I've bought and used the Keychron V1 for some months so here's a brief review of it. I got the carbon black fully assembled knob variant paired with red switches. As of April 2024 it's 12,320 yen so it's more expensive than entry level boards but still in the mid-range price.

The Build

First thing I noticed was that the keyboard is noticeably on the heavier side, the official site puts it around a full kilogram so its fairly weighty to carry around but the metal feels more stable to type on compared to a plastic build.

One characteristic of Keychron keyboards is that they're kinda tall in general. As of January 2024 when I bought this keyboard, Keychron had released the Keychron V1 Max variant which has wireless connectivity and is gasket mounted. At first glance I thought this option was a no-brainer over the vanilla V1 but the V1 Max has a higher front height at 21.5mm compared to the V1's 17.9mm (a 17% increase). The Q1, the luxury variant of the V1 also has this characteristic being 22.6mm high and I suspect it's likely due to the gasket mount. I let my wrists rest on the table when typing but this gets kinda awkward if the front height is too high; a lot of Keychron users pair a wrist rest for better ergonomics. I personally find this goes against portability which is why I chose the V1 with the lowest profile and so far I'm not experiencing any strain at all.

The variant I got has a knob on the top right which by default can be used to adjust the volume. Apparently it can be reprogrammed for other purposes but I haven't tried this yet.

Keys and Switches

For keycaps I originally bought and used the Ocean OEM PBT Keycap Set from the official store. However I later swapped to the XDA Honey and Milk Keycap Set which I used in my first build since I liked the flat, consistent profile. The material of the XDA keycaps also give it a lower pitched sound profile and I prefer the off-white coloring that contrasts against the carbon black frame.

The switches are Keychron K Pro switches with an operating force of 45g, the standard heaviness identical with Gateron reds. I think these are one of the smoothest switches I've experienced out of the box. A lot of switches advertised as factory-lubed don't come close to the experience of manually doing it yourself but these are pretty good. I even briefly tried the Kailh Super Speeds I bought together which were supposedly pre-lubed but went back to the default K Pro reds since they were less scratchy. All switches are hot-swappable so simple switch/key swaps can be done without any disassembly.

The stabilizers are all smooth except for the spacebar which has quite some rattle so manual modifications with lube and/or tape is required to rectify this. This is a bit troublesome because the screw-in stabilizers can't be removed from the front, the whole keyboard needs to be disassembled to access them so it's probably worth it to do other mods in one go.

Sound

The official page has a diagram which depicts the board including a steel plate, as well as sound absorbing foam and silicon pad sandwiching the pcb. Together they give the board a median pitch which neither sounds thocky nor clacky but something in between. I'd say it's a great choice of a board that sounds great even before any modding.

Input lag

The Keychron V1 has input lag that's noticeable when playing games like Street Fighter that demand the responsiveness. RTINGS lists it as having 20ms so it's definitely fine for programming or single player games. I've written a post here about how I tweaked the QMK firmware to reduce the input lag and it seems to be improved by a placebo-like amount.

Conclusion

The Keychron V1 is an affordable, unique sounding board with a solid typing experience straight out of the box and is open to further customization if you want to go down that path. The two main cons are its weight and slightly higher input lag so I'd advise against this board if those are dealbreakers for you.