We often receive questions regarding the lack of availability of transparent keycaps in ISO-DE. We will explain the reasons for this in more detail below.

The reason it's so difficult to get transparent keycaps for virtually any German layout is that there are currently only two common manufacturing processes for producing "translucent" plastic.

Firstly, there are inexpensive keycaps that consist of a transparent plastic core, are then painted black, and finally laser-etched for the legends. These tend to fail after about half a year of use and can be found on cheap keycaps for German layouts, such as those from Razer, Logitech, and similar providers.

On the other hand, there are "double-shot keycaps", such as those used by NuPhy for ANSI keycaps. In this process, two layers of plastic are combined using injection molding, so that the legend consists of a separate material and cannot wear off. However, the minimum order quantity (MOQ) required to produce cost-effectively is approximately 100,000 sets per layout. The reason for this is that the tooling costs for the molds exceed 30,000 EUR, and typically several iterations are required for testing and error productions.

The reason there are no ISO-DE low-profile keycaps made of translucent double-shot plastic is that no company in Germany has yet been able to calculate selling 100,000 sets in German-speaking countries alone. We also ran the numbers and concluded that this is not a sustainable business model for now – the demand simply isn't there.

In short: As long as no very large company is willing to invest significant sums in DE keycaps, there will unfortunately be no translucent keycaps.