Could someone recommend a keyboard that doesn't have ghosting, I am looking for a very cheap one as I am not bothered at all about it having extra features.

I heard ghosting is a relatively new problem and that it didn't occur on older keyboards, is this true? If so could I just buy any old keyboard created before a certain date?

whats ghosting?

https://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/content/projects/AntiGhostingExplained.aspx

I would suggest going to a used store. Salvation army, GoodWill, or pawn/surplus shops. You can probably get a keyboard between $2-$10. Mind you get ones that have all the keys and don't look too worn, and you'll probably be fine.

Only occurs on these new cheap digital keyboards
Old school keyboards never had these problems and were faster.. same with mice.

CRT's are still used by some gamers cause they still out peform lcd's.

Newer stuff is always made cheaper and cheaper.

Ghosting is hardly a new problem. I'm sure it's been around for at least 1-2 decades.

The only cure is to buy very expensive keyboards that have anti-ghosting but you need to watch out when you do. There is a lot of false advertising and snake oil in that area.

20 years is new to some of us.

Ghosting?

key presses that should not occur

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ghosting

See hardware like keyboards are "updated" by method called polling which is a lot like it sounds
The cpu asks the hardware if any updates each request "poll" determines speed.

Slower poll rates usually have higher chance of ghosting.

So use an IBM Model M.

I must say I never recall seeing this kind of problem. Since I do not buy expensive keyboards, I presume it is because of the way I play my games then? I play e.g. lots of FPS games with the normal WASD+mouse setup, and I don't recall ever thinking "Shit why doesn't this key respond?".

Is there some certain way to demonstrate the ghosting problem on normal keyboards which have the problem, e.g. pressing certain keys on a certain game? I'm now using some generic Dell keyboard, I use it also for playing Team Fortress 2 where I annihilate everyone else with ease, ghosting or not.

For those who have never heard of this well known problem before, it's been there for many decades and is caused by technical limitations in the keyboard matrix hardware. To test if your keyboard is affected (it most likely is), do the following:

1) Open up your favourite text editor.
2) Press and hold down both SHIFT keys at the same time and keep them held down.
3) While continuing to hold down both SHIFT keys, carefully type each letter of the alphabet exactly once and continue to the next letter whether or not what you expected to show up on screen actually shows up.

If the results are "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" then congratulations, you have a higher-end gamer keyboard designed to prevent ghosting specifically to make games work better. If your results are missing letters or other anomalies other than what you expected to see then surprise surprise, your keyboard has the very highly expected "ghosting" problem which is the result of technical decisions made 30 years ago which more or less pose no real problems for the intended use of a keyboard for ordinary day to day typing and general purpose use.

Ghosting is only a problem when the keyboard is used in a manner where multiple keys are pressed which would ordinarily not be pressed together at the same time, and which the hardware keyboard encoding method was not designed to handle. The problem varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and model to model depending on precicely how they wire up the keyboard matrix, but ultimately most mainstream consumer keyboards suffer from this problem unless they are gamer keyboards specifically designed to avoid the issue. Even then, many gamer keyboards designed to solve the problem only do so on the left hand side of the keyboard and possibly a limited number of other combinations. It's more expensive to individually register every single key independently, which is why most keyboards do not do this and use a matrix encoder instead. Having said that though, it seems odd that this is still a cost issue in 2016. It's more likely a lazy ass hardware manufacturer in 2016 now. :)



On my keyboard, I get the following results for the double-SHIFT test: "ABDEFGHIJKLNOPQRSUW"

Note the various keystrokes that did not get reported by the hardware.

'Ghosting' is the reuse of an old term meaning the opposite to the problem that used to be called blocking.

Instead of using 105 wires, keyboards use ~30 or so wires in two sets at right angles that form a grid with the keys at the intersections.

This generally work well, but has the limitation that if you press three keys that form a right angle (in the wring matrix) it's impossible to tell exactly which of them has been pressed down.

The keyboard controller can assume that all possible keys are pressed down, but this will mean the system gets a untyped 'ghost' keypress whenever two keys are pressed down. This rarely happened in practice and was mostly only of concern to keyboard developers but there were one or two production models that exhibited this behaviour.

The alternative using this mechanism is to ignore any keys that might or might not be pressed. This was called blocking because when you press the third key, which the keyboard can't detect, it doesn't register with the computer and seems to be blocked by something.

In the last half decade or so the terms have become sort of swapped, presumably because 'anti-ghosting' sounds cooler. Microsoft's Sidewinder X4 in 2010 was the first keyboard I remember really publicising this as a feature.

Just about every PC keyboard has this behaviour, including all of the old and high end models from the likes of IBM and Cherry. It's very rarely an issue, but can be noticed in certain games.

I got myself one of these as the Razer I had before was too loud:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00MVTYUM2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Its been very good.

I got exactly the same with my Dell keyboard. Oh well, at least WASD are there. :) Here are my results for three different keyboards:

1. External Dell keyboard
2. ASUS G75VW laptop internal keyboard
3. Logitech K360 wireless keyboard

ABDEFGHIJKLNOPQRSUW
ADEFGHIJKLOPRSTUWY
ABCEGHIJKLMNOPQRSTVWXYZ

Interestingly the Logitech wireless keyboard seemed to get the best result (missing D F U)? I was expecting it to be the worst in this regard.

How do people normally notice this problem, ie. in what game, doing what? As said, I don't recall realizing ever that some key isn't working while I am playing, or then I have a high treshold for things like that.

Is there a list somewhere of keyboards where this issue isn't present at all?