Computex 2005: Acrox Pro 3D Laser Mouse
Computex 2005: Laser Mice see the light.
Right, I know, you think laser mice are nothing new, and to some extent you’d be right. According to the guys at Acrox, not all laser mice are the same, which is good cos it’d cause a mass of confusion at the end of a LAN if they were. But what makes the Acrox mice specal is their laser eye techonology, which, they claim, is better than anything else on the market.
Now, if you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, it all comes down to the way light is transmitted and received by the mouse… or, in layman’s terms, what goes on with the red dot underneath.
In the trusty old optical mouse, an LED shines onto the surface, bounces off and through a lens onto a sensor. The mouse works by taking a snapshot of the surface it’s moving over and figuring out if the current shot is different from the last and if so, it sends the instruction to move the pointer. The problem is when the light hits shiny surfaces, or irregular patterned surfaces, or even the wrong colour. All of these degrade the reflected beam and cause the mouse to report movement incorretly. A partial solution was to up the brightness of the LED, but this could only go so far before glare started to eror creep in again.
So, with a laser mouse, you get a different experience altogether. The laser emitting diode rated as a Class One laser product suffers fewer problems as there is just one pure wavelength of light being bounced back off the worksurface. Because of this, there’s less scattering due to refraction, dispersal etc and you get a more reliable mouse. I’ve had a short play with the Acrox Pro 3D laser mouse and I tried it out on every surace you could think of… glass, 10mm thick Perspex, marble, slate, shiny kitchen tiles.. all of those problem surfaces for gamers in the past and nothing could stump it… even the nylon of my back pack was not trouble for the Pro 3D.
But it’s not only their LED that’s doing the work, the mouse has a 15x15µm PDA (Photo Diode Array) giving a resolution of 25400 DPI, not bad eh? Couple that with scanning at roughly 300 frames/sec faster than most other optical mice and with a nice low 6mA power consumption and the Pro 3D could be a contender for your next mouse purchase.
