Never even heard of them myself...

They have some really great wooden speakers. I've listened to a couple of different models and they are superb for the price. Certainly better than Logitech and Creative crap.

DracoNihil: You can check their products out here, if you want to.

F2bnp: I'm actually glad to hear that you've had positive experiences with their wooden speakers. I'm actually looking for some nice speakers for me retro computers. Any particular models you can recommend?

Genius SP-HF 1800A:

Cheap but good. 😀

Gamepads and graphics tablets yes, but that's as far as I'm going.

DracoNihil wrote:

Never even heard of them myself...

😊

Evert wrote:

F2bnp: I'm actually glad to hear that you've had positive experiences with their wooden speakers. I'm actually looking for some nice speakers for me retro computers. Any particular models you can recommend?

My brother uses the SP-HF500A, very inexpensive 2.0 speakers. They are great for a retro system. The SP-HF800A are also pretty awesome, although they are a bit larger and thus may not fit your needs.
The SP-HF1800A I've personally not used, but they are gigantic and probably very good.

We had Genius mice back in the day. They all came with copies of the Dr Halo paint program, which as a youngin I got countless hours of enjoyment out of.

I had about half dozen mice from then and saw a keyboard once. Good mice but they fail in 2-3 years. I have some 10+ years old mices (MX300 and MX500) that still perform great. As the old says go, you get what you pay for.

In Russia Genius almost dominates the middle-end peripherals market. Yes, it's middle-end here, of more costly stuff only Logitech and Razer can be seen in the shops. When I'm in the market for basic keyboard or mouse, I always pick Defender. They are outrageously cheap and the quality exceeds Genius.

By the way, 2 different keyboards of Genius SlimStar series I had over time were both a waste of money. Worth 3 times more than a basic Defender, they had really buggy firmware, some keys did not respond for a few moments, some keys "hung" after tapping and so on.

Logitech was my last hope, but now they started doing crap as well. The M560 mouse my Mom gave me for X-mas is a violent representation of what shitty new trends do to otherwise good products.

DracoNihil wrote:

Never even heard of them myself...

do you live in a cave?

Living wrote:

do you live in a cave?

That remark isn't very appreciated...

And no, I have never seen this company before.

EDIT: Tried to check out the website but the fact it requires javascript and is yet another one of those websites with a stupid mobile layout, I find it irritating to navigate so I didn't check out much... I seriously hate this generation... I always knew the future was going to be terrible.

I've had a couple of Genius mice and simple speaker sets through the years. Still use a few of them with some of my legacy systems. Never expected anything great out of them (since I was getting their cheap, low-end models), and was never disappointed. I don't recall any of them ever breaking. Have no experience with any of their higher end stuff.

DracoNihil wrote:

I seriously hate this generation... I always knew the future was going to be terrible.

Maybe you should go and live in a cave 😈

Snayperskaya wrote:

I had about half dozen mice from then and saw a keyboard once. Good mice but they fail in 2-3 years. I have some 10+ years old mices (MX300 and MX500) that still perform great. As the old says go, you get what you pay for.

I suppose that depends on how much you use them as well. When one of the micro-switches on my Logitech Wingman Gamer mouse, finally wore out and began having troubles fuctioning, I simply found replacement switches on Digi-Key, but this time I used soft-click switches (because at the time I was living with family and it was obvious to anyone who woke up in the middle of the night that I was still clicking away on my PC during the wee hours) and replaced all of them. It brought the mouse back to life and was easier to click with quieter clicking.

I don't know if I'd attribute this to the mouse being cheap; look at those Apple mice with the tiny scroll-ball in the center--that stupid thing constantly gets too dirty and doesn't scroll in a given or all given directions. What do they expect people to do? Wash their hands before they use the mouse, each time? 🤣

SquallStrife wrote:

We had Genius mice back in the day. They all came with copies of the Dr Halo paint program, which as a youngin I got countless hours of enjoyment out of.

Sweet, sweet Dr Halo. I wish there was an up-to-date clone of that one; it had such a great interface. The fact that its files could be directly opened with WordPerfect 5.1 was pretty handy too. The one piece of vintage software I hope to get my hands on someday is a copy of Dr Halo IV, the final version; it appears to be available for download nowhere, and there's never been a copy on eBay.

As for the mouse, it had a very nasty habit of spontaneously switching from "Mouse Systems Mode" to "Microsoft Mode", which would pretty much render the cursor inoperative and could only be cured with a restart. (Later three-button serial mice had a manual switch on the bottom expressly designed for selecting the correct mode.)

Did anyone here ever use one of those hand scanners? They strike me as a much more portable and convenient alternative to big flatbeds.

DracoNihil wrote:

Tried to check out the website but the fact it requires javascript and is yet another one of those websites with a stupid mobile layout, I find it irritating to navigate so I didn't check out much... I seriously hate this generation... I always knew the future was going to be terrible.

I'm with ya buddy. I recently switched to my first android phone with the goal of not sharing my personal information with Google or anybody else, but primarily Google. It was incredibly difficult to make it happen, but I mostly succeeded. There are still lots of apps that are crippled or won't work at all unless I give up my info, which I won't do. It seems like the only way to get around Google is to use "Mobo Robo", which is probably almost as bad.

I hate these goddam smartphones. Aside from the added functionality of a web browser and a movie player with a huge 32gb SD card, it really isn't much of an improvement over my old candy bar/slider/flip phones. The "annoyance factor" really diminishes any advantages over a regular cell phone. Still, I really like having the web browser and video player.

I never expected to get old so quickly. Now get off my lawn!

Simply use a fake ID. That is what I do most of the time. 🤣

DracoNihil wrote:

And no, I have never seen this company before.

You are not the only one. I just browsed through their products. They look good, but have no features I am interested in. Do they make any mechanical keyboards? The visual design of their gaming keyboards are writing checks the apparent quality and design can not cash.