Logitech MX1000 Laser Cordless Mouse Review
You've Heard of Mighty Mouse? This One Has Heat VisionSeptember 21, 2004
By Eric Grevstad
You've Heard of Mighty Mouse? This One Has Heat Vision
A family vacation photo? A kitten dangling from a branch? Two cherubs gazing heavenward? A humorous Dilbert cartoon above a padded gel wrist rest? If you've got a favorite mouse pad, you can skip this review. But if you think the executive look involves as clean a desk as possible, you'll want the newest status-symbol desk accessory: the status-price-tagged ($80) Logitech MX1000 mouse, which not only cuts the cluttery cord to your PC, but boasts the first laser instead of LED optical sensor for more accurate tracking on almost any surface.
Ever since Microsoft pioneered the optical instead of rolling-ball mechanical mouse in 1999, one of the technology's big advantages -- along with the abolition of regular rodent maintenance or cleaning accumulated dust and crud -- has been its ability to work on a greater variety of surfaces, even (as notebook travel mouse makers still tout) your pants leg instead of your desk. Actually, a pants leg is easier than a desk because it's a rougher, less regular surface. That makes it simpler for the digital-camera-style sensor to detect the changes in the landscape which it reports as motion to the mouse pointer.
But relatively low-contrast sensors have trouble with smoother-textured, more uniform terrain such as a metal or dark woodgrain desktop. Enter the MX1000: Rather than a glowing red LED, its Agilent Technologies sensor uses a virtually invisible Class 1 laser light source (the weakest type, safe to stare at even through a magnifying glass with no danger of eye damage), whose finer focus can "see" finer surface detail while capturing up to 5.8 megapixels of data per second. The bottom line, according to Logitech, is 20 times better tracking.
They're not lying; it's not just a gimmick. We tried the MX1000 on smooth ceramic tile, metal, and high-gloss photo paper -- all of which left our old optical mouse's pointer stuck in one place on the monitor, no matter how we shoved and skated around the mouse itself -- and it responded flawlessly. Clear glass still stymies the sensor, but almost any other surface should be fine.
Even fast-twitch gamers should be satisfied by the cordless mouse, which combines Logitech's Fast RF radio technology -- the same 125 reports per second as USB corded mice, as seen in the company's MX700 -- with 800 dpi resolution. No matter how quickly we whipped the mouse back and forth in Microsoft Paint, the pencil refused to skip. Combine its high speed with the relentlessly precise sensor, and you begin to think the Laser Mouse's price isn't too steep after all.
Fast-Charging Comfort
Of course $80 is steep -- especially considering how impressed we were with Logitech's Cordless Desktop LX 501, which delivers both an advanced LED mouse and sophisticated wireless keyboard for the same price, in our August review. So the company makes it as tempting as possible.
Like the mouse in the LX 501 set, the MX1000 offers Logitech's new Tilt Wheel Plus Zoom, a belated but, in our opinion, better answer to the Tilt Wheel Technology that archrival Microsoft introduced last year: The scroll wheel has the same slim size and mild click or detent feel during vertical scrolling as a standard mouse's, and rocks left or right to scroll sideways through spreadsheets or images with a noticeably gentler push than Brand M's plump, more slippery-feeling wheel. Clicking the mouse wheel lets you zoom in and out of images or documents using the scroll wheel (with no need to hold down the Ctrl key).
Above and below the wheel are what Logitech calls Cruise Control buttons, which scroll up or down through a document for as long as they're pressed, much like the auto-scroll function you normally get by clicking the mouse wheel and then nudging the mouse up or down. We didn't use them much, finding the scrolling too fast at first and then, after using the SetPoint 2.11 software driver to slow it down, occasionally experiencing run-on scrolling on our Win 2000 desktop that continued even after we released a button. The driver helpfully let us redefine the Cruise Control duo as Undo and Redo or Cut and Paste, as well as changing the zoom back to auto-scroll.
The MX1000 is a fairly large mouse, shaped for right hands only. Above its comfortable thumb scoop are browser Forward and Back buttons, on either side of a QuickSwitch button -- Logitech's word for a pop-up menu alternative to Alt-Tab for switching among applications.
Above those buttons, on the mouse's seamless left edge, is a three-LED gauge that glows to indicate how much charge is left in the lithium-ion battery. While Microsoft sticks with AA batteries for its cordless mice, pointing out that users invariably forget to return the mouse to a charging cradle, Logitech counters that not only is the gauge a visible reminder, but that the MX1000 needs a full overnight (actually four-hour) charge only about every three weeks. A rundown mouse, the company says, can get enough charge for a day's use in approximately 10 minutes.
The cradle (shown at top) doubles as the mouse's radio receiver, with a USB cable to your computer (a PS/2 adapter is provided) as well as a compact AC adapter. Since vacant wall sockets are scarce around our desk, we wish the recharger could draw its power from the USB port, as Belkin's just-announced MediaPilot cordless keyboard does.
Again, an $80 mouse is not for everybody, especially if everybody is content to use a pad which lets an LED optical mouse work just fine. But if you want a world-class combination of speed, accuracy, convenient controls, and X/Y/Z-axis scrolling on almost any desk or tabletop, the MX1000 Laser Cordless Mouse is a technological tour de force.
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