Digital Trends

Logitech MX1000

October 5th, 2004 | by Larry Chen

Technology Evolved

The mouse has undergone a major advancement since Microsoft released the first optical mouse back in 1999. Today, optical mice have been rapidly replacing the old-school ball-based mechanical mice due to their high tracking accuracy and low maintenance requirements. Back in 2002, Logitech released the MX series performance mice featuring the high performance MX Optical Engine which pushed optical tracking technology to a new level. With the ability to collect 4.7 mega pixels of information per second at 800 dpi, serious gamers were no longer afraid of picking up an optical mouse for their high-end needs. Even though optical mice work on most surfaces, they become quite annoying to use on a glass desktop or on top of other high-gloss surfaces. To address this issue, Logitech worked closely with Agilent Technologies to design the heart of the next generation of performance mice, and the first laser mouse with 20x the tracking power over the traditional optical sensor was born.

So what's new about the MX Laser Engine? Let's start by examining a traditional optical sensor in a mouse.

As shown in the diagram below, an optical mouse has three general components: a light source to illuminate a surface (usually red LED), an imaging system to focus the reflected light on the image sensor, and the image sensor.

To track the movement of your mouse, the imaging sensor first collects a series of images from the surface and then compares the images to determine the direction and velocity. What if the image is too blurry or without any contrast? That is what happens when you use a traditional optical mouse on top of a relatively flat surface like a piece of glossy photo paper. What caused the image to be unclear? The reason is that traditional optical mice use LED light to reflect from the surface. LED light is considered “incoherent”, which only reflects the shadows of the surface. Unlike an LED light source, MX1000 uses a “coherent” laser beam to accurately “measure” the surface, which results in 20x the resolution over any traditional LED based optical mouse.