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About them mice...

About them mice...

About them mice...

(OP)
Here is, in my opinion, a very informative read for people wanting to compare computer mice:

ESReality.com - Benchmarking mice


They benchmarked a lot of mice, the things they tested:

Quote:


What can we measure?

Perfect Control
When you move your mouse it may result in turning your viewpoint in an FPS game, moving the cursor in an RTS game, or something else like rotating a tank turret. In each case the importance of using a mouse is the proportionate response. If you move the mouse slowly you expect to turn slowly or the cursor to scroll slowly. If you move quickly you want to be turning faster or the cursor to move quickly across the screen. If someone creeps up behind you in a game you want to be able to make a wild flick of the mouse to face your opponent quickly and return fire. The ideal mouse response is a linear one, where moving the mouse twice as fast results in a response of "twice as much". I define Perfect Control as the top speed up to which the mouse performs exactly as it should.

Malfunction Speed
Another important factor in choosing a mouse is the fastest speed you can move before it gives up and decides to fire the next rocket at your feet. I call this the Malfunction Speed, where the mouse loses control and effectively stops working. When you flick your mouse beyond the Malfunction Speed, anything can happen. You may either end up looking in any random direction or just find you haven't turned around at all. All optical and laser mice must have a Malfunction Speed, so we want it to be as high as possible so you don't notice it.

Dots-per-inch
With a printer, the DPI (dots per inch) tells you how well the printer can translate information from the computer onto paper. For a mouse, the DPI value tells you how well the mouse can translate your hand movements to the computer. It would seem that a higher DPI would theoretically mean a better mouse? Before you run out to buy the highest DPI mouse we should think carefully about how much DPI is actually useful on a computer that spends most of its time displaying images made up of pixels. I discuss this a little more on the next page.

The Perfect Control speed should equate to how nice a mouse responds when moving around a lot (higher value would let you move the mouse faster and still have the pointer go where you would expect it to be).

The DPI value comes down to preference, but generally you'd want a high dpi mouse because of the generally higher dpi monitors used for CAD.

(for the impatient: straight to the graphs)

Stefan Hamminga
EngIT Solutions
CSWP/Mechanical designer/AI student

RE: About them mice...

What?  Objectivity in such a discussion?

Thanks for the clarity.  (Star)

Jeff Mowry
www.industrialdesignhaus.com
Reason trumps all.  And awe transcends reason.

RE: About them mice...

(OP)
Thank you for the star!

Another thing I stubled upon:

UberOptions
This is a small tool to customize button mappings on your logitech mouse & keyboard (it changes Setpoint settings).

http://www.mstarmetro.net/~rlowens/uberOptions/

Stefan Hamminga
EngIT Solutions
CSWP/Mechanical designer

RE: About them mice...

UberOptions was linked in one of those other mouse threads as well.  I downloaded it and I think it's great.  My mouse is a "gaming" mouse (MX518), so it didn't allow application-specific button mapping, which I am now using quite extensively thanks to UberOptions.

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