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Enjoyed the reply there. Mice nowadays vary hugely in price, from 2 button roller balls to wireless optical ones. We have an optical here and i much prefer the technology itself. No problems with dirt and grime etc and the movement is always true. The infrared sensors are extreemly reliable in original mice however and i have often used these in other projects, after ripping the things apart.

An optical mouse uses a light-emitting diode and photodiodes to detect movement relative to the underlying surface, rather than moving some of its parts — as in a mechanical mouse. Early optical mice, circa 1980, came in two different varieties: 1. Some, such as those invented by Steve Kirsch of Mouse Systems Corporation, used an infrared LED and a four-quadrant infrared sensor to detect grid lines printed on a special metallic surface with infrared absorbing ink. Predictive algorithms in the CPU of the mouse calculated the speed and direction over the grid. 2. Others, invented by Richard F. Lyon and sold by Xerox, used a 16-pixel visible-light image sensor with integrated motion detection on the same chip and tracked the motion of light dots in a dark field of a printed paper or similar mouse pad . These two mouse types had very different behaviors, as the Kirsch mouse used an x-y coordinate system embedded in the pad, and would not work correctly when rotated, while the Lyon mouse used the x-y coordinate system of the mouse body, as mechanical mice do. As computing power grew cheaper, it became possible to embed more powerful special-purpose image processing chips in the mouse itself. This advance enabled the mouse to detect relative motion on a wide variety of surfaces, translating the movement of the mouse into the movement of the pointer and eliminating the need for a special mouse-pad. This advance paved the way for widespread adoption of optical mice. Modern surface-independent optical mice work by using an optoelectronic sensor to take successive pictures of the surface on which the mouse operates. Most of these mice use LEDs to illuminate the surface that is being tracked; LED optical mice are often mislabeled as "laser mice". Changes between one frame and the next are processed by the image processing part of the chip and translated into movement on the two axes using an optical flow estimation algorithm. For example, the Agilent Technologies ADNS-2610 optical mouse sensor processes 1512 frames per second: each frame is a rectangular array of 18×18 pixels, and each pixel can sense 64 different levels of gray. Optomechanical mice detect movements of the ball optically, giving the precision of optical without the surface compatibility problems, whereas optical mice detect movement relative to the surface by examining the light reflected off it.