Don't believe the hype - laser wasn't meant for gaming (till now).
At first glance today's laser gaming mice looks awesome. The technical specifications and features in gaming mice are constantly improving and have now reached levels that would have been considered science-fiction just a few years ago. The constant improvement in the technical specs (and the ridiculous focus on these) means that the technical specs usually dominate the packaging on gaming mice, explaining how dramatically improved this mouse is over its predecessor or over similar competing products. All kinds of different manufacturers promise the Holy Grail when it comes to describing what their mice can do. Laser technology, 4.000 DPI, a high number of buttons, Burst-Fire-Button, glowing colors, gold-plated USB connectors and "always on hyper ultra something" are just some of the features that are offered to us, in the mouse manufacturers quest of making their potential customer one of the top gamers in the world. According to these companies every top gamer would be even better when using a 4.000 DPI laser mouse. "For gamers by gamers", "created for gaming", "the ultimate gaming mouse", "hardcore gaming" - you'll find all these statements, and many more, when browsing today's gaming mice.
As a manufacturer of professional gaming gear our view is radically different. High and inflated performance numbers, or fancy "ultra-hyper-power" expressions, does not equal great gaming products. Period. SteelSeries is one of the few companies where all hardware is actually tested by real professional gamers. It's our belief and guideline that if professional gamers approves a concept, idea or product, our development of a product is heading in the right direction. When we label something a "professional gaming product" we do so because we believe it's better than a "standart" off-the-shelf product. Gamers use their computers, peripherals, and gear in ways that demand much more than the average office user. They use their equipment more rigorously, for longer periods of time, demand faster reaction times, more power - when it comes to computers and peripherals, gamers have higher requirements than any other consumer group in the world. Since 2001 we have been providing gaming surfaces to these professionals, whilst improving on surface quality and materials thanks to continued dialogue and feedback from the best gamers in the world.
While we were working on our surfaces, gaming mice started evolving too. More and more companies started labeling their mice "gaming" and up to a point everything was fine and dandy. That all changed with the introduction of "laser gaming mice". Logitech released their G5/G7 and Razer released the Copperhead. These companies ventured forth and promised 2.000 DPI precision and a number of other benefits thanks to this new "fantastic" laser technology. Many people followed the marketing call and bought these new gaming mice, which seemed to boast awesome technical specifications. The reality is that shortly after the market introduction of these laser mice we started receiving complaints via e-mail. Hundreds of e-mails. Then thousands of e-mails. For some of these products firmware updates eventually helped the mice reach a performance level where only experienced and advanced users could tell that the technology wasn't on par with the old optical technology.
The problem with conventional laser mice
So what is the problem with laser? First of all, the laser technology was never developed for gaming to begin with. The technology was originally developed to improve tracking on glossy surfaces, on wooden surfaces (like desktops) and the marketing buzz was all about "more surfaces". It's a sad fact that even today many laser mice works awful on most of the plastic mouse pads on the market.
Another problem with today's laser mice is that they function using image correlation. Meaning that the sensor snaps pictures of the surface, then compares these pictures to determine the movement of the mouse. If the user performs an "advanced movement", which can include sudden deceleration, mouse movements at a certain angle or something else weird, that couldn't be programmed into the robotic testing machines, the mouse will either stall or try to "guess" the intended movement. This is not what we consider "gaming grade". A gamer requires precision and accuracy from his gaming gear - not software that tries to predict and emulate his intended movements. If these "gaming laser mice" had been tested by professional gamers before their release, the test results would have clearly indicated that they weren't suitable for high level gaming.
It is our mission, both as SteelSeries and individuals, to make products for professional gamers who demand (and expect) high quality. Other companies (not all though;)) have high standards as well, but fail miserably when it comes to actually testing their products. We distance ourselves from marketing hype, bullshit and useless specifications the same way as we distance ourselves putting features in a mouse that are beyond pointless or added just to for marketing purposes.
Our approach to gaming mice:
Feature: Drivers. A mouse driver generally allows a higher level of interacting between the mouse and the computer. In the driver all sorts of features can be switched on or off and various kinds of fine-tuning (like sensitivity) can take place.
Problem: Many mice utilize "advanced" functions that only work properly if the driver is actually installed. This is in particular a problem for professional gamers who often need to play on tournament computers, where installing/uninstalling drivers is time consuming and sometimes even technical impossible (due to closed systems).
Solution: Make the mouse driverless. The performance of the mouse is the same, no matter if the computer has a driver installed or not. Gamers can even program the macro features on the SteelSeries Ikari Laser Mouse from home - and use all functions on third party computers without installing software.
Feature: XXXX DPI for maximum precision/accuracy.
Problem: When a company mentions DPI in the same sentence as precision, or anything else regarding better tracking, it is simply bullshit. First of all the term DPI (Dots Per Inch) has nothing to do with mice. It's an expression from the printing world and shouldn't even be used to describe mouse movement. DPI is meant to describe the fact that for one inch of distance you move your mouse on any surface, the equivalent number of counts are sent to the PC - resulting in movement on your screen. The correct term for this is CPI (counts per inch). You can achieve higher CPI in many ways: By having a larger image, higher sampling rate, better light source quality, adding DSP (Digital Signal Processor) power and having the right algorithm (prediction). You can unfortunately also reach bloated CPI settings, by faking an increase through software in drivers, firmware or windows settings. Let's say you make a movement of exactly one inch, from left to right, with your mouse. With a 400 CPI sensor your PC would receive exactly 400 counts, and would move 400 pixels (the smallest visible movement) to the right (assuming you haven't touched any mouse speed settings in windows). Now we do exactly the same movement with a 3.200 CPI sensor. With one inch of movement we move 3.200 pixels on the screen. This has nothing to do with precision - but has something to do with speed of movement. Your cursor (or crosshair) moves faster with 3.200 CPI, but the precision of the sensor is exactly the same as neither sensor skips a pixel. There is only one situation where a higher CPI count makes sense: if the speed on the screen is too slow, you want to have a sensor that is capable of more CPI, as everything that goes beyond it has to be calculated by software and then you LOSE precision. As an example let's say you double your windows sensitivity on the 400 CPI sensor mouse and make the one inch movement described above: now you just move 2 pixels at a time. You can try this easily for yourself by setting your windows mouse speed to the max and making movements. You will now notice pixel skipping. To summarize: High CPI settings does NOT equal ultimate precision. High CPI settings will not make you a better gamer - as evidenced by the fact that most professional Counter-Strike gamers use 400 to 800 CPI in games. CPI settings only marks the highest on-screen speed you can achieve, not the highest precision you can achieve. If you are using software to alter your movements you will lose precision.
Solution: If you're a gamer precision and accuracy is vital, thus it is our belief that it's much more important to have the exact right CPI setting for your personal usage pattern, than to have high inflated CPI settings. Our SteelSeries Ikari Laser Mouse uses a new technology - named SteelSeries ExactSens. SteelSeries ExactSens is a new unique mouse technology, which is very different from the normal CPI calculation utilized by standard image correlation based laser sensors. Most current laser mice can only set their true hardware "DPI" in increments of 400 CPI without using software. The ExactSens technology in our sensor enables us to set the CPI (in the actual hardware) in increments of 1. So why is this important? If you examine today's mice for professional Counter-Strike gamers you will see that most mice use either 400 or 800 CPI. They use those specific values because they can't choose anything in between without a driver, but being able to adjust the CPI settings would totally make sense. When other companies say "fine-tune your DPI" you would actually in most cases just double the speed you're playing with, which is a really weird feature to offer to a gamer. If you only want it to be 10% faster than with your previous mouse you adjust the mouse to 440 CPI. 50% faster? 600 CPI is also possible. And the result you get by using this technology is much more precise than just adjusting sensitivity in Windows or in the game you're playing. Note that the SteelSeries ExactSense technology is also capable of setting the CPI as low as 1. If we compare to other mice: The first laser mice that offered 2.000 CPI had 400CPI increments only (and that was also limited). You had a driverless function for tunable sensitivity, but in reality it only offered 4 settings: 400, 800, 1.600 and 2.000. By using the first two steps you would double your speed and the mouse would get insanely fast. Less than 400 CPI weren't possible. Neither were steps in between those, without the use of software. If a SteelSeries ExactSense powered mouse has 2.000 CPI it will have an availability of 2.000 hardware based sensitivities. No less. Please note that CPI is not really a setting of precision on the surface itself. It is merely the resulting on-screen-speed of the movements you're doing with your mouse. The 1-cpi increments enable you to SET the speed as exact as you want it. Today there is nothing more exact than the SteelSeries ExactSense technology. It is the defining tool to perfect your mouse speed preferences.
Feature: On-The-Fly CPI switching. Almost every mouse in the market have the ability to switch between different CPI settings. Many of them are saying that it's "on-the-fly" used as a synonym for fast reaction.
Problem: We use the term Actions Per Minute (APM) when referring to gaming products and the inherent need for the user to do a high number of operations while gaming. Our object is to reduce reaction time for the user, no matter what commands he is issuing to his computer. With that in mind it doesn't make sense to utilize any "on-the-fly" feature that requires 2 to 4 button presses to obtain the desired CPI. We very rarely see gamers using more than two different CPI settings in same game.
Solution: Our toggle feature simply allows the user to set 2 exact CPI settings and then toggle between them. This will increase the APM of the user (compared to a standard mouse) and help eliminate situations where a user accidently hits the wrong CPI-settings.
Feature: Works on more surfaces than optical. This was the biggest lie when laser mice for gaming was announced back in the day. "More surfaces" should have meant "more ridiculous surfaces" (seen from a gaming perspective).
Problem: Tons of gaming mouse pads, including our own, had serious problems with the mice. It's not because the pads are bad, but because the conventional laser technology has very specific surface requirements. If you called tech support at one of the bigger mice companies, they would probably have told you that "you don't even need to use a mouse pad with our new laser mouse". Which was somewhat true - the laser was capable of sub-standard tracking on many surfaces. To gain precision and accuracy, you need a mouse pad that offers consistent performance. And it's not just a question of precision, it's also a question of comfort for anyone who uses their computer for hours at a time. Gamers do that. Having people buy a $100 USD gaming mouse, and not even recommend a mouse pad, is a tragedy. You compromise the performance of the mouse and you give your new customer a bad experience. It's like buying a very expensive car and the dealer tells you that the tires don't really matter.
Solution: The forthcoming SteelSeries Ikari Laser Mouse uses a drastically different approach, to eliminate the tracking problems found in conventional laser mice. We still use the laser as a tool to light up the surface area where we track information, but the comparison stops there. Our mouse utilizes a sampling rate of 40.000 samples per second (SPS), but our SteelSeries XY2 chipset is using an advanced technology where we only need 4 inputs, compared to the hundreds of inputs a conventional sensor requires to do image correlation. The SteelSeries XY2 processor can thus process a significantly larger amount of calculations than conventional laser mice. Furthermore the SteelSeries XY2 technology calculates the X and Y displacements independently which results in total flexibility and freedom for the user.
Feature: Prediction and correction of movement. Let's say you're trying to make a horizontal movement. Of course your hand isn't 100% steady, so your line will have slight diversions and wouldn't be completely straight. Back in the day, the manufacturers of mouse sensors decided to include a feature in the optical sensors of their mice, that would help people draw straight lines. It would "remove" the small diversions, if the diversion was less than a certain angle and instead just draw a perfectly straight line. The funny thing is: This feature has never been marketed, though it has been in countless mice over the past years. Can you guess why?
Problem: Prediction cost you precision. Period. If your mouse is trying to predict your movements, instead of just performing the movements you are actually doing, your precision is obviously degraded. If you want to make a movement that is almost, but not quite, a straight line (meaning you want to move a bit up and like half a screen to the right for example) then your movement will be altered. This function of sensors kicks in pretty fast and the worst part: in most sensors you can't even disable it.
Solution: The introduction of SteelSeries FreeMove. This frees your movement from pre-calculated or altered movements imposed by your sensor. What basically happens is the following: As our sensor is programmable we let you remove (recommended), keep and even tune the settings of this particular feature. After conducting testing with gamers, it became painfully obvious that prediction should be optional. FreeMove allows the user to completely disable prediction as well as utilize different degrees of prediction, as personal preference dictates. Again, this prediction "feature" has never been marketed, and we expect you will see several mouse companies remove the feature in the future now that we have brought attention to it. This will hopefully make future mice more precise for everyone.
Feature: Glowing lights/illumination. That stuff looks nice, really, but after about 5 minutes it gets old. And it gets old fast.
Problem: We make professional gaming gear or "sports equipment" for gamers to use another description. We don't make toys. A large percentage of our customers are older than 15. Have you ever seen Tiger Woods with a golf club that glowed blue? Or Beckham with shoes that glowed green? No.
Solution: Don't make it glow..
Feature: Weight systems. The weight of a product can give a feeling of quality. Weight in a gaming product is a preference. However most people highly favor a low weight mouse. And when we say "most people" we actually mean that not a single gamer we asked (out of thousands) felt that an adjustable weight system was anything but useless.
Problem: The heavier the mouse is, the more strain is put on your arm and especially on your wrist. The weight system itself is fundamentally flawed for serious gaming: even if you remove all weights that came with your killer gaming mice, the mouse will still be heavier than it should have been - simply because the built-in weight system itself adds weight to the mouse. The lower the weight is, the faster the reaction time can be. The lower the weight is, the more control the user has. Why would you want a weight system then?
Solution: Cut the crap.
SteelSeries Ikari
15 months of research and development went into the SteelSeries Ikari mice. 15 months where we looked at ergonomics, technology, shape, motion, hand grip and various play styles. From the very beginning our approach to this project was to develop gaming mice based on input and feedback from professional gamers. We did research and testing with our American partners in New York and Dallas. We did testing with our European partners in Sweden, Germany, France, United Kingdom and Denmark. We did testing and research in Korea and China.
The result is two gaming mice which feature the same chassis, but utilize very different technology. Proven (and optimized) optical technology in the SteelSeries Ikari Optical Mouse and groundbreaking new "gaming grade" technology in the SteelSeries Ikari Laser Mouse.
Best regards,
Kim, Jonas, Tino and Jacob
SteelSeries Development Team
At first glance today's laser gaming mice looks awesome. The technical specifications and features in gaming mice are constantly improving and have now reached levels that would have been considered science-fiction just a few years ago. The constant improvement in the technical specs (and the ridiculous focus on these) means that the technical specs usually dominate the packaging on gaming mice, explaining how dramatically improved this mouse is over its predecessor or over similar competing products. All kinds of different manufacturers promise the Holy Grail when it comes to describing what their mice can do. Laser technology, 4.000 DPI, a high number of buttons, Burst-Fire-Button, glowing colors, gold-plated USB connectors and "always on hyper ultra something" are just some of the features that are offered to us, in the mouse manufacturers quest of making their potential customer one of the top gamers in the world. According to these companies every top gamer would be even better when using a 4.000 DPI laser mouse. "For gamers by gamers", "created for gaming", "the ultimate gaming mouse", "hardcore gaming" - you'll find all these statements, and many more, when browsing today's gaming mice.
As a manufacturer of professional gaming gear our view is radically different. High and inflated performance numbers, or fancy "ultra-hyper-power" expressions, does not equal great gaming products. Period. SteelSeries is one of the few companies where all hardware is actually tested by real professional gamers. It's our belief and guideline that if professional gamers approves a concept, idea or product, our development of a product is heading in the right direction. When we label something a "professional gaming product" we do so because we believe it's better than a "standart" off-the-shelf product. Gamers use their computers, peripherals, and gear in ways that demand much more than the average office user. They use their equipment more rigorously, for longer periods of time, demand faster reaction times, more power - when it comes to computers and peripherals, gamers have higher requirements than any other consumer group in the world. Since 2001 we have been providing gaming surfaces to these professionals, whilst improving on surface quality and materials thanks to continued dialogue and feedback from the best gamers in the world.
While we were working on our surfaces, gaming mice started evolving too. More and more companies started labeling their mice "gaming" and up to a point everything was fine and dandy. That all changed with the introduction of "laser gaming mice". Logitech released their G5/G7 and Razer released the Copperhead. These companies ventured forth and promised 2.000 DPI precision and a number of other benefits thanks to this new "fantastic" laser technology. Many people followed the marketing call and bought these new gaming mice, which seemed to boast awesome technical specifications. The reality is that shortly after the market introduction of these laser mice we started receiving complaints via e-mail. Hundreds of e-mails. Then thousands of e-mails. For some of these products firmware updates eventually helped the mice reach a performance level where only experienced and advanced users could tell that the technology wasn't on par with the old optical technology.
The problem with conventional laser mice
So what is the problem with laser? First of all, the laser technology was never developed for gaming to begin with. The technology was originally developed to improve tracking on glossy surfaces, on wooden surfaces (like desktops) and the marketing buzz was all about "more surfaces". It's a sad fact that even today many laser mice works awful on most of the plastic mouse pads on the market.
Another problem with today's laser mice is that they function using image correlation. Meaning that the sensor snaps pictures of the surface, then compares these pictures to determine the movement of the mouse. If the user performs an "advanced movement", which can include sudden deceleration, mouse movements at a certain angle or something else weird, that couldn't be programmed into the robotic testing machines, the mouse will either stall or try to "guess" the intended movement. This is not what we consider "gaming grade". A gamer requires precision and accuracy from his gaming gear - not software that tries to predict and emulate his intended movements. If these "gaming laser mice" had been tested by professional gamers before their release, the test results would have clearly indicated that they weren't suitable for high level gaming.
It is our mission, both as SteelSeries and individuals, to make products for professional gamers who demand (and expect) high quality. Other companies (not all though;)) have high standards as well, but fail miserably when it comes to actually testing their products. We distance ourselves from marketing hype, bullshit and useless specifications the same way as we distance ourselves putting features in a mouse that are beyond pointless or added just to for marketing purposes.
Our approach to gaming mice:
Feature: Drivers. A mouse driver generally allows a higher level of interacting between the mouse and the computer. In the driver all sorts of features can be switched on or off and various kinds of fine-tuning (like sensitivity) can take place.
Problem: Many mice utilize "advanced" functions that only work properly if the driver is actually installed. This is in particular a problem for professional gamers who often need to play on tournament computers, where installing/uninstalling drivers is time consuming and sometimes even technical impossible (due to closed systems).
Solution: Make the mouse driverless. The performance of the mouse is the same, no matter if the computer has a driver installed or not. Gamers can even program the macro features on the SteelSeries Ikari Laser Mouse from home - and use all functions on third party computers without installing software.
Feature: XXXX DPI for maximum precision/accuracy.
Problem: When a company mentions DPI in the same sentence as precision, or anything else regarding better tracking, it is simply bullshit. First of all the term DPI (Dots Per Inch) has nothing to do with mice. It's an expression from the printing world and shouldn't even be used to describe mouse movement. DPI is meant to describe the fact that for one inch of distance you move your mouse on any surface, the equivalent number of counts are sent to the PC - resulting in movement on your screen. The correct term for this is CPI (counts per inch). You can achieve higher CPI in many ways: By having a larger image, higher sampling rate, better light source quality, adding DSP (Digital Signal Processor) power and having the right algorithm (prediction). You can unfortunately also reach bloated CPI settings, by faking an increase through software in drivers, firmware or windows settings. Let's say you make a movement of exactly one inch, from left to right, with your mouse. With a 400 CPI sensor your PC would receive exactly 400 counts, and would move 400 pixels (the smallest visible movement) to the right (assuming you haven't touched any mouse speed settings in windows). Now we do exactly the same movement with a 3.200 CPI sensor. With one inch of movement we move 3.200 pixels on the screen. This has nothing to do with precision - but has something to do with speed of movement. Your cursor (or crosshair) moves faster with 3.200 CPI, but the precision of the sensor is exactly the same as neither sensor skips a pixel. There is only one situation where a higher CPI count makes sense: if the speed on the screen is too slow, you want to have a sensor that is capable of more CPI, as everything that goes beyond it has to be calculated by software and then you LOSE precision. As an example let's say you double your windows sensitivity on the 400 CPI sensor mouse and make the one inch movement described above: now you just move 2 pixels at a time. You can try this easily for yourself by setting your windows mouse speed to the max and making movements. You will now notice pixel skipping. To summarize: High CPI settings does NOT equal ultimate precision. High CPI settings will not make you a better gamer - as evidenced by the fact that most professional Counter-Strike gamers use 400 to 800 CPI in games. CPI settings only marks the highest on-screen speed you can achieve, not the highest precision you can achieve. If you are using software to alter your movements you will lose precision.
Solution: If you're a gamer precision and accuracy is vital, thus it is our belief that it's much more important to have the exact right CPI setting for your personal usage pattern, than to have high inflated CPI settings. Our SteelSeries Ikari Laser Mouse uses a new technology - named SteelSeries ExactSens. SteelSeries ExactSens is a new unique mouse technology, which is very different from the normal CPI calculation utilized by standard image correlation based laser sensors. Most current laser mice can only set their true hardware "DPI" in increments of 400 CPI without using software. The ExactSens technology in our sensor enables us to set the CPI (in the actual hardware) in increments of 1. So why is this important? If you examine today's mice for professional Counter-Strike gamers you will see that most mice use either 400 or 800 CPI. They use those specific values because they can't choose anything in between without a driver, but being able to adjust the CPI settings would totally make sense. When other companies say "fine-tune your DPI" you would actually in most cases just double the speed you're playing with, which is a really weird feature to offer to a gamer. If you only want it to be 10% faster than with your previous mouse you adjust the mouse to 440 CPI. 50% faster? 600 CPI is also possible. And the result you get by using this technology is much more precise than just adjusting sensitivity in Windows or in the game you're playing. Note that the SteelSeries ExactSense technology is also capable of setting the CPI as low as 1. If we compare to other mice: The first laser mice that offered 2.000 CPI had 400CPI increments only (and that was also limited). You had a driverless function for tunable sensitivity, but in reality it only offered 4 settings: 400, 800, 1.600 and 2.000. By using the first two steps you would double your speed and the mouse would get insanely fast. Less than 400 CPI weren't possible. Neither were steps in between those, without the use of software. If a SteelSeries ExactSense powered mouse has 2.000 CPI it will have an availability of 2.000 hardware based sensitivities. No less. Please note that CPI is not really a setting of precision on the surface itself. It is merely the resulting on-screen-speed of the movements you're doing with your mouse. The 1-cpi increments enable you to SET the speed as exact as you want it. Today there is nothing more exact than the SteelSeries ExactSense technology. It is the defining tool to perfect your mouse speed preferences.
Feature: On-The-Fly CPI switching. Almost every mouse in the market have the ability to switch between different CPI settings. Many of them are saying that it's "on-the-fly" used as a synonym for fast reaction.
Problem: We use the term Actions Per Minute (APM) when referring to gaming products and the inherent need for the user to do a high number of operations while gaming. Our object is to reduce reaction time for the user, no matter what commands he is issuing to his computer. With that in mind it doesn't make sense to utilize any "on-the-fly" feature that requires 2 to 4 button presses to obtain the desired CPI. We very rarely see gamers using more than two different CPI settings in same game.
Solution: Our toggle feature simply allows the user to set 2 exact CPI settings and then toggle between them. This will increase the APM of the user (compared to a standard mouse) and help eliminate situations where a user accidently hits the wrong CPI-settings.
Feature: Works on more surfaces than optical. This was the biggest lie when laser mice for gaming was announced back in the day. "More surfaces" should have meant "more ridiculous surfaces" (seen from a gaming perspective).
Problem: Tons of gaming mouse pads, including our own, had serious problems with the mice. It's not because the pads are bad, but because the conventional laser technology has very specific surface requirements. If you called tech support at one of the bigger mice companies, they would probably have told you that "you don't even need to use a mouse pad with our new laser mouse". Which was somewhat true - the laser was capable of sub-standard tracking on many surfaces. To gain precision and accuracy, you need a mouse pad that offers consistent performance. And it's not just a question of precision, it's also a question of comfort for anyone who uses their computer for hours at a time. Gamers do that. Having people buy a $100 USD gaming mouse, and not even recommend a mouse pad, is a tragedy. You compromise the performance of the mouse and you give your new customer a bad experience. It's like buying a very expensive car and the dealer tells you that the tires don't really matter.
Solution: The forthcoming SteelSeries Ikari Laser Mouse uses a drastically different approach, to eliminate the tracking problems found in conventional laser mice. We still use the laser as a tool to light up the surface area where we track information, but the comparison stops there. Our mouse utilizes a sampling rate of 40.000 samples per second (SPS), but our SteelSeries XY2 chipset is using an advanced technology where we only need 4 inputs, compared to the hundreds of inputs a conventional sensor requires to do image correlation. The SteelSeries XY2 processor can thus process a significantly larger amount of calculations than conventional laser mice. Furthermore the SteelSeries XY2 technology calculates the X and Y displacements independently which results in total flexibility and freedom for the user.
Feature: Prediction and correction of movement. Let's say you're trying to make a horizontal movement. Of course your hand isn't 100% steady, so your line will have slight diversions and wouldn't be completely straight. Back in the day, the manufacturers of mouse sensors decided to include a feature in the optical sensors of their mice, that would help people draw straight lines. It would "remove" the small diversions, if the diversion was less than a certain angle and instead just draw a perfectly straight line. The funny thing is: This feature has never been marketed, though it has been in countless mice over the past years. Can you guess why?
Problem: Prediction cost you precision. Period. If your mouse is trying to predict your movements, instead of just performing the movements you are actually doing, your precision is obviously degraded. If you want to make a movement that is almost, but not quite, a straight line (meaning you want to move a bit up and like half a screen to the right for example) then your movement will be altered. This function of sensors kicks in pretty fast and the worst part: in most sensors you can't even disable it.
Solution: The introduction of SteelSeries FreeMove. This frees your movement from pre-calculated or altered movements imposed by your sensor. What basically happens is the following: As our sensor is programmable we let you remove (recommended), keep and even tune the settings of this particular feature. After conducting testing with gamers, it became painfully obvious that prediction should be optional. FreeMove allows the user to completely disable prediction as well as utilize different degrees of prediction, as personal preference dictates. Again, this prediction "feature" has never been marketed, and we expect you will see several mouse companies remove the feature in the future now that we have brought attention to it. This will hopefully make future mice more precise for everyone.
Feature: Glowing lights/illumination. That stuff looks nice, really, but after about 5 minutes it gets old. And it gets old fast.
Problem: We make professional gaming gear or "sports equipment" for gamers to use another description. We don't make toys. A large percentage of our customers are older than 15. Have you ever seen Tiger Woods with a golf club that glowed blue? Or Beckham with shoes that glowed green? No.
Solution: Don't make it glow..
Feature: Weight systems. The weight of a product can give a feeling of quality. Weight in a gaming product is a preference. However most people highly favor a low weight mouse. And when we say "most people" we actually mean that not a single gamer we asked (out of thousands) felt that an adjustable weight system was anything but useless.
Problem: The heavier the mouse is, the more strain is put on your arm and especially on your wrist. The weight system itself is fundamentally flawed for serious gaming: even if you remove all weights that came with your killer gaming mice, the mouse will still be heavier than it should have been - simply because the built-in weight system itself adds weight to the mouse. The lower the weight is, the faster the reaction time can be. The lower the weight is, the more control the user has. Why would you want a weight system then?
Solution: Cut the crap.
SteelSeries Ikari
15 months of research and development went into the SteelSeries Ikari mice. 15 months where we looked at ergonomics, technology, shape, motion, hand grip and various play styles. From the very beginning our approach to this project was to develop gaming mice based on input and feedback from professional gamers. We did research and testing with our American partners in New York and Dallas. We did testing with our European partners in Sweden, Germany, France, United Kingdom and Denmark. We did testing and research in Korea and China.
The result is two gaming mice which feature the same chassis, but utilize very different technology. Proven (and optimized) optical technology in the SteelSeries Ikari Optical Mouse and groundbreaking new "gaming grade" technology in the SteelSeries Ikari Laser Mouse.
Best regards,
Kim, Jonas, Tino and Jacob
SteelSeries Development Team
Nice text. It's the same with digital cameras. The companies are mainly advertising with the amount of megapixel, but it does say a shit about the quality.
But at the same time they haven't mentioned a word about mouse shape and ergonomics.
It's a shame they haven't gone in-depth about the USB polling issue, as that makes quite a differences for lots of mices.
What i hated most of the article are all those marketing messages of how much better and superior their product is compared to other high-grade gaming mices on the market based on the few specifications they discussed through out the article.
and sanda got the rest!
atleast the thing about doing straight line, it was really weird when i changed from G5 to WMO now i know why
like this?
Secondly I found this article pretty dull and extremely self-boasting. They're basically telling you to be a good consumer and don't believe everything you read on a mouse package. Wow, I really need SS to tell me that. And they don't even apply the same principles to themselves. Take his metaphor with the car and tires;
No, the cardealer won't say it runs just as fine without wheels. He'll say the car runs best on their wheels or the wheels of their partners, wether it's true or not. It's the same thing with SS, they'll tell you their mice run best on their mousepads even though it isn't true.
This is a pretty shameless attempt at self-promotion (I know it was posted on their page) and doesn't really bring much new to the table that hasn't been said before. It has no place on Crossfire.
didnt they say that their lasermodel is ment for RTS games and optical for FPS games
Why would I spend a lot of money switching again, and then again when someone release a new and "better" mouse?..
i think that lasers would be at the bottom of the list but maybe the SS ikari optical could compete.