Optical vs. Laser Mouse

[sepp0]

I'm looking for a mouse for low-sens gaming in CSGO and just wanted to ask a technical question about the mouse-sensor types.

My old mouse which was a Razer DeathAdder Respawn worked perfectly for me. It was a 3.5G optical sensor and I was happy with it.
Since then, I've had 2 laser mice. Razer Imperator which has dual sensors (laser as the primary) and Roccat Kone XTD which also is a laser mouse.

Anyway, I did a lot of googling and found that generally everyone agrees on these facts:

Laser
+ Lasers are capable of reading accuratly of more types of surfaces.
+ Lasers can reach higher acceleration rates
+ Lasers can read more dots per inch (DPI)

- Laser sensors have inconsistant acceleration rates (hardware) which cause mouse movements at high speed to move slightly further than at slower speeds. This is hardware related and cannot be disabled.

Optical
+ There are no acceleration problems. Mouse will move 1:1 at any speed up to the hardwares limits. (Obviously windows acceleration must be off)

- Can't reach the same accuracy and acceleration speeds as the laser-sensors.
- Not read properly on some surfaces.


Result:

Optical sensors (on proper mousepads) are generally better for games, specially FPS-games where accuracy is critical. Even though the actual sensor on a laser mouse is more accurate and faster technically, the inconsistancy in the acceleration makes the mouse:cursor movement deviate and for FPS-gamers sometimes cause inaccurasies when aiming quickly.

With laser mice, low sens gamers will experiance inaccuracies when moving their mice very fast (for reaction shots or quick 180-spins) even though all other specs are better on paper.


Can anyone verify, give facts or numbers to proove or deny these statements?.

And if this is the true, why can't my Roccat Kone XTD (laser) track my fastest mouse-movement properly? If I move too quickly, the mouse will stutter and only complete like 80% of what I was trying to do. The DeathAdder (optical) never had this problem!

Anyway, thanks for any serious discussion and facts!
I know I'm getting really technical here, but I'd like to know so I can get the best possible mouse for my gaming experiace without having to buy every one and testing for myself.

 

[Wall Street]

- Can't reach the same accuracy and acceleration speeds as the laser-sensors.

I would like to comment on a few points from this statement:

1. "Cannot reach the same accuracy as laser sensors"

Don't confuse accurate with higher resolution. A laser sensor has higher resolution and optical cannot match that because the DPI is just naturally lower. However, when people think accuracy the key question is does the movement correlate 1:1 between where the mouse moves on the mousepad and where the cursor moves on the desktop. Lasers are at a disadvantage here because they tend to experience acceleration, which means that for a movement of the same distance on the mousepad the cursor will move a different distance on the screen depending on what speed you do the movement. However, both optical and laser mice can exhibit angle snapping (a.k.a. prediction), jitter and smoothing. These are also mouse errors and both optical and laser mice can have these.

2. "cannot reach same speed/acceleration as laser sensors"

This is really old now, but in ESR MouseScore 2007, the opticals certainly tracked the fastest. There are certainly both laser and optical mice that can track beyond 3 meters/second. Try downloading the enotus mouse test to see how fast you can swipe. For most gaming swipes, 2 m/s is sufficient. I think that perfect control speed is overrated since pros could use the Intellimouse line of mice which don't control well past 1.5 m/s, and now a majority of mice more than double that. I try to find the top control speed on the G400 (optical) that I have and it requires standing up and throwing my arm across the mouse pad like a baseball pitcher throwing a sidearm fastball.