Mouse Stuff I've Learned.

DPI - Dots Per Inch. However, this does not mean dots per SCREEN inch, but instead dots per inch you physically move the mouse. For example: if I have a mouse that is set at 1800 DPI, then when I move the mouse a physical inch on the mouse mat it should move 1800 dots on the screen. This is why the term (to me) is a little misleading because I've always related DPI to monitor resolution where a higher DPI means more dots in an inch on the monitor screen. This isn't so with mouse DPI. If I adjust the same mouse to 400 DPI, then when I move it one inch on the mouse mat it will move much less on the screen because it's only moving 400 dots instead of 1800 for the inch I physically moved it on the mouse mat.

That confused me for a while, so in case anyone else was confused about it I thought I would put this snippet here to clarify.

How to setup a mouse with high DPI or multiple DPI settings
There's many ways to start, but this is how I do it.
*Set your windows mouse sensitivity in the control panel to the 3rd notch from the left (on the low side).
*Set your mouse (via software that came with it, or buttons on the mouse itself) to the highest DPI setting it has.
*Your mouse should now be somewhat near a decent movement speed now.

I see people in forums write all the time, "Why would someone need more than 800 DPI? Faster than that is just a waste!" Here's exactly why you would want as high a resolution as you can get...

If you have a mouse with adjustable DPI, try just the opposite as I listed above. Set the mouse DPI to 400 (or whatever its lowest setting is) and then adjust the windows sensitivity in control panel up around the last mark, or within a couple marks of that (on the high speed end). Open Notepad or something where you have a nice white background to watch your pointer on. Now... move your mouse very slowly in a diagonal fashion, say from the bottom left to the upper right.

See all those jagged, jumpy twitches your mouse is making? That's the reason you want high DPI and not low DPI. A typical 400 dpi mouse needs the mouse sensitivity in the control panel cranked way up to make it usable for people who don't want to drag their mouse across the whole mat and lift it all the time. This in turn makes it extremely jumpy, because it's trying to move at 400 dpi but it really can't because it's having to "skip" dots to do what the windows mouse control is telling it to do. So you get a stair-stepping effect, sort of like 0 anti-aliasing for mice if you're familiar with that gaming graphics term.

High DPI is lke 8x or 16x anti-aliasing for mice basically. It lets your mouse make much finer movements without the staircase/stair-step effect. This is especially important for people who do graphics design for a living as well as gamers (the latter more for fun however and less imperative!). I cannot stand using an old Microsoft Optical mouse because of the 400 DPI setting. I use mice that are at least 1600 dpi or more because I do not want to see stair-stepping when my mouse moves, as this makes simple tasks like highlighting text more difficult to do. With high DPI, this task becomes something you don't have to be so careful with and instead is something really smooth and easy to do.

Great mice with high DPI I recommend are the Razer Diamondback 3G, Death Adder, and Logitech G9, G5 or G3.

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