Difference between Membrane Keypads and Mechanical Keypads:

Posted by markwahl barg on February 28th, 2019

Today membrane keypads are most common among many computer and electronic devices. It has a part of plastic that when we press the key, activates the membrane which goes straight to the circuit. Its main advantage is that there are various types, very cheap and do not produce much noise.

Today even medical device manufacturers have started using membrane keypad in their devices.

What are Membrane keyboards:

The membrane keyboards, as its name indicates, offer us a membrane that covers all the keys, so that each key does not have a unique operation, so when a key is damaged, we cannot replace it with another one, as it happens with the mechanical keyboards.

Membrane mechanism of keyboards:

Each key has a different kind of pad that is pressed when pressing on the key, it does not offer us any type of feedback other than the visual one when the letter that we have pressed on the screen is shown. The main issue of not having feedback is that it is more common to make mistakes when writing because we will never be sure if we have pressed the corresponding key correctly or not.

They are not usually used in desktops and touch screen technology, usually carry devices such as photocopiers. They have 2 plastic membranes, one conductive in the non-visible part and another in which the key that we are going to press appears. Normally this sort of keypad emits clear sounds when pressing the keys since they don’t have the characteristic click of normal keyboards.

This sort of keyboards are the most economical to build, so they are also the most economical models that we can find in themarket today and for now, will remain.

Mechanical keyboard:

The mechanical keyboards are a whole world, since not only do we have at our disposal a large number of options, but we also find a large number of different mechanisms for each need. The mechanical keyboards offer us an independent switch for each key, which has a spring in the lower part, between the switch and the key so that it returns to its original position.

The most characteristic of this sort of keyboards is the characteristic noise they make, but as we mentioned in the previous paragraph, having different mechanisms or systems, the noise of each one is different, as well as the pressure that we have to exert on each one of them.