Kensington Expert Mouse Optical USB Trackball for PC or Mac 64325
by Kensington
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List Price: Our Price: $68.53 You Save: $59.42 (46%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $35.00 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Kensington Expert Mouse Optical USB Trackball for PC or Mac 64325
Customer Review: Great mouse but not perfect
Summary: 4 Stars
To date, I have used almost every single type mouse on the market. Each type has its own benefits but downfalls as well, and the Kensington is no different.
The best features:
- Can be used by both left handed and right handed people.
- The learning curve is incredibly fast on this trackball. I bought it to use with my left hand (I am actually right-handed but wanted to give my right hand a rest when it started to get painful) and the ease and control I have with it using my left hand is practically as good as mice I use with my right.
- The 4 buttons that surround the trackball are very useful. You can program each button as well as button combinations. Add the shift or control key to the combo, and you increase your options even greater. It's very easy to program and you can program the keys globally or specific to a particular program. I use the copy & paste feature a lot so I've programmed the 2 of the buttons to do just that and it speeds things up quite a bit.
- I do like the scrolling wheel. You can scroll up or down with any finger.
I was hoping the Kensington would completely eradicate my need for my other mice. I tend to rotate the mice I use because I find that after a while, my hands/fingers/wrist start to ache because each particular mouse stresses a different part of my body. Sadly, the same is true with the Kensington.
The worst:
- The buttons require way too much force to press down. Of course it's not HARD to press down on them, but when you are repeatedly clicking (especially since the mouse has all those cool programmable buttons), all that clicking does add up. I find that my clicking fingers become painful after a while (and the pain shoots to my wrist). That's when I have to switch to another mouse. I wish the buttons required more of a tap rather than a press of the finger. To me, this is a HUGE negative with this mouse. It sounds minor but to me, it's not. Any feature that results in pain when using the mouse almost defeats the purpose of that particular mouse.
- The angling of the mouse is much too high. If you are just resting your hand on the mouse, that's fine. But if you are using your forefingers to scroll the ball, it forces your wrist backwards. My wrist gets tired and stiff from that. You could potentially use other parts of your hand to scroll but it gives you less control. This is the only mouse I have used that I've experienced this problem with, and I think it was a huge oversight by the creator to angle the mouse so high.
If Kensington just fixed the 2 relatively minor issues above with the mouse, I think we'd have a true winner. As it is though, as fantastic as I think many of the features on this mouse is, I can only use it in conjunction with other mice.
Customer Review: Good apart from lousy build tolerances...
Summary: 3 Stars
They just don't make 'em like they used to. That goes for both Kensington and for Logitech, who made the trackball I was trying to replace when I bought the Kensington Expert Mouse.
Ironic that they all suffered from a similar problem: general poor quality.
On the Kensington, which I just received today, the issue was lag. As is the case with many optical devices, when you stop moving the ball for more than a second, the little laser light goes dim. When you move again, it gets bright again in order to sense your movements.
Problem is that after going dim, the laser in this Kensington Expert Mouse... didn't want to get bright again when you moved the ball. Or rather, it did if you randomly swirled the ball around for 1-3 seconds. In other words, any time you put your hand on the ball in order to move your mouse pointer, you had to engage in 1-3 seconds of continuous random motion before the mouse would "wake up" and actually start to move the pointer on the screen. Totally unacceptable.
The fix? Not wanting to wait for an exchange, I disassembled the mouse. Sure enough, the laser was misaligned in relation to the lens and the sensor had an extra glob of plastic that hadn't been properly molded out of it. I got some needle-nose pliers and aligned the laser to the lens by hand, then used a sewing needle to remove the blob of plastic in the sensor.
Result: 95 percent improvement. Now it only "lags" one out of every 20-30 or so times I go to move the mouse, and only for half a second, rather than lagging by 1-3 seconds every single time. I'd love to get the remaining lag out, but the lens assembly is made to poor tolerances and is slightly too small for its mount, so there's a little bit of play in it.
I'm glad I (95 percent) got it working without lag, but Kensington should have done all this for me, especially at this price level.
Just so that nobody thinks I'm advocating Logitech instead, I'm not. For many years I was a die-hard Logitech user, but now I've gone through three Trackman Wheel units in two years, two for worn out main button switches and the latest one (which the Kensington replaces) because it's started failing electronically and undergoes USB disconnects right in the middle of use on any PC or Mac, after which it must be unplugged and re-plugged before it'll work again.
Long review short: 3 stars for the Expert Mouse. Lots of potential, although the angle isn't quite ergonomic (hint: rotate it 180 degrees and remap the buttons and it's more ergonomic), but the build quality and tolerances mean that unless you want to disassemble or exchange, you could be stuck with lag every time you go to move your pointer, as several magazine reviews around the 'net have pointed out, and as my experience bears out.
Customer Review: Not worth the high price.
Summary: 2 Stars
Let me start by saying that I have an RSI in my right hand that makes using mice very difficult. I currently use a Logitech Marble Mouse, and I am looking for an alternative trackball to use for 3D Modeling and digital illustration that I can use comfortably, that has a built-in scrolling function.
For the amount of money you pay for this item, I expected it to be a higher quality, better designed trackball than average. I was pretty disappointed.
The very steep angle that the trackball base rests at is misery for someone with an RSI. I had to use the wrist rest, as well as use a thick book to "level" the trackball out before I could even start testing it out.
For someone like me who has never used a Kensington, the button layout is awkward and over time, painful. Using the trackball one-handed, I could only use one of the four buttons comfortably; using any of the other three buttons required that I lift and twist my hand in one way or another in order to use them. In the span of a few hours of using my 3D Modeling software, my hand was in too much pain for me to continue.
The most disappointing part is the Scroll Ring. I couldn't believe how cheap, flimsy, and poorly responsive this ring is. Sometimes it would scroll, sometimes it wouldn't, and sometimes it'd scroll by four or five lines just from touching it. And I'm not talking about twirling the ring in orbit around the trackball. I mean just simple line-by-line scrolling in a basic webpage. I can't imagine how garbage like this made it into the final design, and someone at Kensington HQ ought to be embarrassed by it.
I will say that I was impressed by how nice it is to use two-handed, save for that "award winning Scroll Ring". When placed directly in front of you and used two handed, you can reach any of the four buttons you want at any time with one hand, while simultaneously using the ball with the other. The trackball is nearly frictionless, and very comfortable to use even with the RSI. The problem is that for the kinds of software I use, I have to have one hand on the trackball and buttons, and the other hand on the keyboard using modifier and shortcut keys. Two-handed operation just isn't an option, comfortable as it may be.
Had this cost about a third as much as I paid for it, I would have probably overlooked the shoddy Scroll Ring, and kept it to use two-handed on my other computer. As it stands, what this ends up being is an expensive mouse alternative that is actually less useful and more painful for me to use than a standard mouse. Hopefully when Kensington goes back to the drawing board, they'll flatten that angle, get a Scroll Ring that isn't garbage, and maybe consider an alternate button layout.
Customer Review: Surprisingly, disappointed!
Summary: 3 Stars
A little background: I first discovered the kensington track ball back in the early '90's while studying for my Computer Science degree. It was the greatest, coolest idea I had ever heard of relative to the PC accessories world, and ever since then I've been yearning for my own. I never really had the extra money to justify paying a $[...] for a glorified mouse, so I just waited. Meanwhile, years later, I chose the Logitech Cordless Trackman Optical. Finally, I seized the opportunity to buy this Kensington (a month ago) due to a $[...] off sale.
After using my beloved Expert Mouse, I'm not as thrilled by it as before. Over the years I think some companies have caught up and implemented a better "trackball". I'm a freelance photographer and need the precise tracking and functionality for my graphics programs.
1. All the buttons are basically the same. The same feel, the same basic shape. You can't learn the different buttons thru touch other than the 4-corner positions. The Logitech Trackman does a much better job than the Kensington on this.
2. The "reach" for the top two buttons is difficult due to the size of the ball, especially when your fingers are moving from the bottom two. Having a different texture or noticeable shape would help when you're blindly trying to control (or orient) the mouse.
3. You CANNOT program the ring!!! This is so ridiculous until its beyond me! The wheel on the Logitech is fully programmable, AND can be pushed down just like a mouse button for even additional functionality! I used to be able to assign the "ring" or "wheel" to zoom in and out on some of my graphics apps, but no more with this Kensington. I am really disappointed in this.
4. The "ring" does not track accurately in one of my apps and feels cheaply put together (that's the only part though). In scrolling up and down, sometimes you'll have to move the ring over a couple or three "notches" before the page will move, then the very next "notch" will advance the page correctly. It should move the page with each "notch". For a $[...] mouse this is unacceptable.
5. Mouse buttons are too soft. In resting my hand comfortably on the trackball I constantly "trip" the buttons because of this. Very irritating. I'll be looking at a web page, and then all of a sudden the browser will go back to the previous page because I've inadvertently pressed the "back" button.
I'm gonna try and adjust to it, but I've been seriously considering going back to the Logitech. Oh, the Logitech is $[...] regular price. I bought this one for $[...] after rebate and still feel that I paid too much.
Hope this helps someone!
Customer Review: Great trackball. MS Trackball Explorer was better.
Summary: 5 Stars
I was an Expert Mouse user years ago when it still used wheels, having tried just about every other trackball on the market at the time. I loved it, until I found the Microsoft Trackball Explorer. Though I have tested other trackballs since then, I have not purchased any other type or brand of trackball since... until recently when I was looking for another Trackball Explorer to use with my laptop and found that Microsoft had quit making them. I guess there were just not enough of us out there buying them to make them money. Of course, of the ones I purchased for various family members after finding the Trackball Explorer, I think I only had to replace one in the past 10 years or however long it has been, which means they did not make much from me after the initial purchases. I would guess that would be similar for other Trackball Explorer users.
Anyway, as for the new Expert Mouse, which I decided to try again. I have found that it is pretty much identical to the original wheeled type, only with it now being optical there is none of the hang-ups that would happen when the wheels would get gunk on them. Being optical also makes cursor movement more precise.
On the down side, diagonal movement is far slower and clunkier that vertical or horizontal, unlike the MS Trackball Explorer, which was smooth no matter which direction you moved the cursor, and even more precise than the Expert mouse.
It also takes a while to train yourself to not just lay your hand down wherever is comfortable when rolling the ball, as it is very easy to accidentally click the lower left or right buttons unless you keep your hand position in mind at all times. This was never a problem with the Trackball Explorer. Unlike the Trackball Explorer where all of the buttons and the scroll wheel were positioned right under your thumb and fingers, and required no hand movement to click or scroll, the Expert Mouse's controls do require you to adjust hand position for many actions. Also, unlike the wheel on the Trackball Explorer, the "ring" on the Expert Mouse has no push and click ability.
The Expert Mouse is well constructed, giving that "well made" feel I have never found in other trackballs except the Trackball Explorer.
All in all, even though the Trackball Explorer was by far superior in every way that I can think of, the Expert Mouse is the only real replacement for it since Microsoft decided to kill off the Trackball Explorer. I give the Expert Mouse 5 stars because it is a very good trackball, currently the best on the market in my opinion, though it would have received only a 4 if the Trackball Explorer were still available.