Dye-sub keycaps

Why it is always PBT

Sublimation needs heat — enough to open the polymer so the dye can enter it. PBT tolerates that; ABS deforms first. This is a hard constraint rather than a market preference, which is why the fifty-one sets on this page are fifty-one out of fifty-one, with no exceptions to find.

It also explains the colour limit that trips people up. Dye can only go darker than the plastic underneath, so dye-sub legends are dark on light caps. A light legend on a dark cap needs reverse dye-sub, where the background is dyed and the legend is left as bare plastic — we track exactly one such set, Wooting's Dye-sub PBT, and it is filed separately for that reason.

The backlight you are giving up

Dye sits inside opaque plastic, so it blocks light. Fifty of fifty-one sets here are not shine-through, against ten of fourteen on the doubleshot page. If your board has per-key RGB and you expect to read the legends at night, this page is the wrong one — the light will glow around the caps and stop there.

That is a real trade, not a defect. What you get for it is the entire design space: none of the illustrated, gradient and novelty sets in this list could be moulded.

Who is actually on this shelf

Thirty-nine of the fifty-one are Lofree, and that changes what the number means. Lofree's sets are cut for its own profiles — Touch at 17.5 mm, Flow at 6.3 mm, Edge at 5 mm — and the last two are low-profile designs that do not fit standard MX switches. They will not go on a Keychron, a Glorious or an Epomaker board.

The sets that will fit a normal hot-swap keyboard are the seven Epomaker sets in Cherry profile — Opalux, SereniTea, AquaShift, Lavender Jade, Sunflower, Mist Clouds, DuoChrome — plus two Wooting sets and the 219-key Keychron OEM kit. Check the profile before the picture.