Art. Lebedev Studio’s Optimus Maximus Keyboard at CES 2008

I dropped by the Art. Lebedev Studio booth on Monday and promptly checked out their new Optimus Maximus Keyboard. For those of you not familiar with the Optimus Maximus, it’s a keyboard where the buttons contain programming OLED displays built right in. This means you can associate an image and a function to every key that has an OLED display built in. All of the programming is done via a software application and you can literally display any picture you want on an active button.

The OLED displays measure 10.1 x 10.1 mm and have a resolution of 48 x 48. Frame rates are around 10 frames per second which means the buttons can even display video clips.

You can purchase the Optimus Maximus keyboard on their website but be warned – they’re not cheap at all. Here are the prices for the different configurations.

For one active button (basically one OLED key), it’ll cost you roughly $462 dollars.
For 10 active buttons, it’ll cost you nearly $600 dollars
For 47 active buttons, it’ll cost you nearly $1000 dollars
And for all 113 active buttons, you’ll have to spend $1564 dollars or so.

Here are more pictures of the keyboard. You can find additional information about the keyboard here on their website.