There are hundreds of different mice to purchase, especially if you happen to be searching through NewEgg. 395, to be exact. That number is going up and down almost every day with new technologies, and older technologies being wiped off the map. New things are normally better, but sometimes it might just be best to stick with what you know. I am going to give you a quick run down through a few of the different options you can chose.
Ball Mice
Let’s start with the old school. If you happen to be using one of these mice right now, I want to give you a pat on the back. You are a person of pure magic. Ball Mice are old school because they are run with moving parts inside the mouse, and to be completely honest, they aren’t even sold any more.
Ball mice worked pretty well, they worked on all surfaces no matter what, and they weren’t really all fussy, at the time.
After a little while, they tended to get dirty. If you look down at your keyboard right now, you will probably see some crumbs and maybe some hair that might be falling out due to you going absolutely insane..at your mouse. Who knows! But think of all that stuff getting wound up into the mouse and getting stuck inside the rollers that make the mouse move.
Oh, I didn’t explain the rollers? Okay! There is one big ball in the middle that you can feel without taking the mouse apart, when you were a kid you were always told to not touch the ball because the oils from your finger will make the mouse work not as well, which is actually a good plan, slicking up something that needs friction is generally a bad thing. The friction is needed because the ball pushes against two rollers that are kind of like rolling pins inside of the mouse, when the two meet, they spin! When they spin, they create an X and Y axis that make the mouse move in every direction you need it to. If your mouse used to only go up and down, not left and right, then one of the rollers inside the mouse might have been jammed, just popping out the ball and cleaning off the rollers normally fixed that problem right up!
Optical Mice
Forget ball mice, nobody uses them, they are worthless. If you are using one right now, that’s great, your really are magical, but get rid of it. It’ll be good for you.
Optical mice are the next thing to talk about, as they came out as a replacement to ball mice. They work a little bit differently, and to be honest I can’t get extremely specific as to how they work, so let me just quote a great source:
Developed by Agilent Technologies and introduced to the world in late 1999, the optical mouse actually uses a tiny camera to take 1,500 pictures every second. Able to work on almost any surface, the mouse has a small, red light-emitting diode (LED) that bounces light off that surface onto a complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS sensor).
The CMOS sensor sends each image to a digital signal processor (DSP) for analysis. The DSP, operating at 18 MIPS (million instructions per second), is able to detect patterns in the images and see how those patterns have moved since the previous image. Based on the change in patterns over a sequence of images, the DSP determines how far the mouse has moved and sends the corresponding coordinates to the computer. The computer moves the cursor on the screen based on the coordinates received from the mouse. This happens hundreds of times each second, making the cursor appear to move very smoothly.
Okay! If you read that, awesome, you are even more magical then the people who have ball mice! So here we go, essentially the optical mouse takes thousands of photos a second and transfers those to a type of movement. They work on most surfaces, but I have never had any luck with these sort of mice on glass, seeing as how the camera inside the mouse really has nothing to take a picture of!
Laser Mice
The last bunch out of the bunch is the laser beam mouse! No, you wont be using this type of mouse in Star Wars anytime soon, you wont be cutting anything or using it as a laser pointer, it just simply doesn’t work like that. Sorry!
Laser mice are pretty straight forward, and I don’t think I need any quotes to sum everything up and get me out of a jam. Basically, the mouse shoots a small laser out of the bottom of it, and it tracks differences in the surface of whatever you happen to be using. When you move the mouse around, the mouse moves on screen! Just like all the other ones! These tend to work pretty well on just about every surface, they also have problems on glass but there are new mice that are actually made to work extremely well on glass. These are a very new technology, and sadly I have not had an oppurtunity to use one of these type of mice.
Summary
To sum things up, there are three true types of mice that are available. There are hundreds of different styles of input devices out there, like trackballs and tablets that allow you draw smoothly and elegantly.
Ball mice are done with, they are a thing of the past, sadly. They worked pretty well when they were around, but they lost all of their flare almost as soon as optical mice came out. Optical mice are probably what you are using right now, they get the job done and work on most surfaces without any hassle. Laser mice are the newbies in the zone, they are a bright and rising star but sometimes it doesnt really seem worth it to use them for regular use, they are much more precise and normally for someone who needs an extremely detailed ‘brush’ stroke.
All in all, just use what feels comfortable to you! When you go to purchase one at a retail store, most of the time you can try them out and feel them before you actually buy them, and I suggest that heavily. It is like shopping for clothes, it is so much more difficult to buy a shirt that you havn’t actually tried on, so think of buying a mouse as trying it on!
