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Originally Posted by Cptn Vortex  There are 2 types of "laser" engines. Optical uses a LED light and a optical light sensor to track movements. It is still very good, very precise, but some may say it is not as lightning fast as Laser. I got the laser model, and it is indeed extremely fast and responsive. My friend has the Optical, and it feels pretty much the same. There is not too much of a difference. I bought the Laser when it was on sale for about $70. I think another difference, is the lift height. Meaning, how high the mouse can be off the ground for the light sensor to stop tracking. The Laser has a much lower lift distance, only 1.8mm until it stops tracking, whereas the Optical is 3.8mm until it stops tracking. This I guess isnt that important to most people. |
I think there are actually three groups of optical mice and the ways their illuminators work:
-infrared scatter/beam
-diode (LED) scatter
-laser beam
Personally, I've come across a number of pesky issues with the laser engine used in the Logitech G5/G7, which is the same Agilent 6010 image processing chip used in the Razer Copperhead. My brother uses a Logitech MX510 (which uses an optical LED engine also designed by Agilent), which I found was able to track exceptionally well across many surfaces. On the flipside, the G5/G7's laser engine is very picky about what surface the mouse is moving on. Glass (or composite glass mouse pads) would would lack texture and wouldn't reflect enough of the laser back to the lens; likewise for highly polished, troughless desk surfaces. Most cloth mouse pads absorb the laser almost outright.
If you want near-absolute precision in a mouse, you can't get much finer than a high-resolution laser mouse on a fine matte surface, with the hardware-/mouse-controlled resolution turned very low**--maybe as low as 600dpi. For everything else, especially with straight tracking on surfaces, LED mice will continue to reign until laser mice can advance their image processing to cope with the issues their extremely high resolutions entail.
**Correction: set the hardware resolution very high and software resolution very low (sorry)