Logitech G9 Laser Mouse
by Logitech
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Our Price: $139.98 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $32.50 (click here) Category: CE See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Logitech G9 Laser Mouse
Customer Review: The new king of gaming mice
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been a Logitech gaming-mouse user/lover for a long time. In fact, the last four mice I've used with my gaming rig have been the MX510 (Blue), MX518, G5 (1st version) and now the G9.
The G9 is the perfect combination of the old G5 (precision, accuracy and on-the-fly resolution adjustments) and the MX revolution (with that killer mouse wheel), stuffed into in a customizable, comfortable and easy to control form factor.
Pros:
- I really like the new weight style much better than the G5. The weight "tray" is hidden under the grip so there is no way it can just pop out like on the previous generation mouse. For me, a properly weighted mouse is key in FPS. Too light and you are all over the screen. Too heavy and you are too late.
- Not only can you change the weights, but you can also change the grips to suit your playing style and the color of the LED indicators. I prefer the Wide Load grip for my big hands and the blue LEDs to match my Microsoft Reclusa Gaming Keyboard (Black).
- As long as you are a "righty", it's very comfortable, even after some marathoning. Like all previous Logitech mice I've owned, ergonomics and comfort are never lost in the design.
- Another great addition is the ability to save up to 5 profiles to the mouse's internal memory. No drivers or software needed to load up your custom mouse settings. There is a switch on the bottom that lets you toggle through your profiles. Perfect for LAN parties when you might not be gaming on your own rig.
- Scrolling with the Micro Gear is a blast when not gaming. There is a switch under the mouse that lets you toggle between what I call the "click" mode (a must for weapon changing in FPS) and the "scroll" mode (a must for scrolling web pages and long documents).
- The gaming-feet surface is much improved. I use this mouse with a SteelSeries SteelPad QcK+ mouse pad and it is smooth as butter. I eventually plan on moving to a solid surface pad as I've heard they can improve accuracy with less friction.
- There are two thumb buttons on the left side. I know this was added to newer model G5 (my older version didn't have this) and it's a warm welcome. These are a must for forward/back functionality when you browse the web.
Cons:
- The Setpoint software is a little flaky. I chalk this up to being an early release. It took a couple reinstalls to finally get it to work correctly. Its possible previous software versions on my PC caused this issue. Everything works now.
- I can't use my wrist pad with this mouse. I know it sounds weird, but the back of the mouse isn't as long as the G5 and it slopes downward in a way that forces your wrist to touch your mouse pad. Because of this, it works best without an elevated wrist pad behind it. If you do try to elevate your wrist/forearm, it can be pretty uncomfortable. No biggie, I'll make due.
- $100 price. Ouch, but I've gotta have the latest and greatest.
So there you have it. I'll update this review as I put it through more testing.
Be sure to check out the customer photos section. I took some photos of the G9 side-by-side with my old G5. Enjoy!
Customer Review: You'll Either Love It or Hate It - I Liked It
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
PACKAGING:
Slick box, but like almost everything you buy these days, there's entirely too much plastic. Logitech, however, has put some effort into the packaging, since even with the amount of plastic, it's relatively easy to unpackage.
LOOK/FEEL/HANDLING
This mouse has really wide feet! The mouse has the slightest degree of resistance on the desk. Configurable weights, but I felt it was just about right without adding any out of the box. It has a good, solid precision feel to it. The overall shape and control locations are very natural, but very different compared to most of the mice we're used to. Its lower and wider profile may not be what you'd expect nor are used to. Handling this mouse for the first time, I'm reminded of the early Razor Boomslang model, it does take just a little bit of getting used to. Its small front to back relative to the G5 laser, but quite a bit wider. It fits a little uncomfortably in my hand and leaves the base of my hand on my sitting on the desk. I've always preferred that to resting my wrist on the desk. The mouse came with 2 skins, a soft, slightly tacky skin and a hard plastic, grained skin. I'm not partial to either of them. If you liked the G5, use the hard plastic skin, if you liked your older Logitech mice, use the softer skin. They are different widths, I preferred the texture of one and the width of the other.
SOFTWARE INSTALLATION:
The software installs painlessly, it includes an option to install the automatic update tool - something that software authors should really avoid (I don't want yet another service running on my leaky Windows machine.) I opted not to use this feature, but the installer installed it anyway AND loaded it at startup. Something I assume will get fixed before the general release. Finally - a setpoint with no e-bay icon (although I installed the eval. drivers, so maybe that's a feature that gets added in later on! Downside - it appears to be the standard setpoint software, but I had no ability to program the mouse - that screen was just missing in the evaluation driver that I test against.
CONTROL LOCATIONS:
The left and right mouse buttons are a little lower to the desk, along with the overall lower profile. The controls are smooth and precise, something you'd expect from Logitech. By default, the mouse wheel operates in "smooth mode" none of the familiar clicks. I found this feature really annoying and imprecise if you bind weapons changes to this. Fortunately, a simple push button on the bottom of the mouse restores the click. Forward and back buttons I presume will be programmable. The mouse sensitivity button seems fairly precariously located at the base of the left mouse button, however I never managed to get the sensitivity out of whack during normal gaming.
PARTING THOUGHTS:
You'll likely end up in the "love it" or "hate it" camp around this mouse based on its shape. Technically, and precision wise, it's a fine mouse, just what you'd expect from Logitech, and I'm sure that there will be third party skins available for it once it's general release.
Customer Review: Quite amazing but you may not need it.
Summary: 4 Stars
Pros:
This mouse is pretty amazing in its feature set. The software works in Windows Vista 64. However I suggest going to the logitech site and downloading the latest version there for your OS. Once you download it you can set the functions of the various keys and the sensitivity of the laser, the sampling rate (the rate in which the mouse measures movement, from my understanding). You can also save and create profiles or change the color of the light.
The amazing thing is once you set your preferences all that data is saved on the mouse itself! So say you set the side thumb buttons to increase or decrease the volume. You can now go to a different computer or OS and that button will perform the same function. Even in the OS that you installed the mouse software, you don't need the software running in the background to use your macros or switch profiles. Amazing! If you're worried that buying a high end mouse like this means another process in your process tree, don't.
The pads on this thing are unbelievable smooth. Using it on a wood surface almost feels like gliding on the the table. I would imaging using this with some sort of ultra smooth mouse pad would be absolutely incredible.
Cons:
Of course the question is, given this price, do you really need all that functionality? Do you really need a mouse that can do 2000 dpi?
Coming from a cheap wireless optical mouse I thought the idea of 2000 dpi was awesome. But once you tried it out I realized that it was simply overkill. It is way too sensitive. So i tried my settings with a maximum of 1800 and it was still too sensitive to play an fps with. Imagine turning the sensitivity bar in the options menu of your game to max. Finally I settled with a setting of 800 1000 1200 and 1600 dpi increments. Even then I constantly run it in 1000 dpi, while surfing or gaming. I only occasionally adjust it while playing a brand new game if the sensitivity isn't right. Of course the same effect can be accomplished much more cheaply via the sensitivity bar in the game's options menu.
So basically don't let dpi be the selling point for this mouse, increasing dpi is just like increasing "sensitivity" in the options.
Finally the high sampling rate might be another selling point. But again do you really need it? Frankly I couldn't for the life of me tell the difference between 1000 sampling rate and 1500. Also keep in mind that a higher sampling rate will require more processing power, taking away from game performance.
As for comfort well I found that adding weight to it makes it travel less smooth. So the feature of being able to add weight to it is again unnecessary, for me at least, since I prefer the travel to be as smooth as possible.
Final thoughts:
Buy this only if you have $65 to burn and you really can't think of anyplace else to spend it (some surround sound headphones maybe). If you've been getting by with your trusty old mouse then save your money. I honestly don't think the features are necessary. If you might lose your job in the next 6 months but you really need a gaming mouse and are thinking about this or something that costs less, buy the one that costs less.
I apologize for any spelling or grammar mistakes, its 1:03am and I don't feel like proof reading.
Customer Review: Detailed Review: Top quality mouse, perfect for gamers, Linux users, and everyone else
Summary: 5 Stars
Simply put, this is by far the most impressive mouse I've ever seen. Some of its unique features suit me exceptionally well, so I will get into some specifics in this review.
The mouse looks and feels great. With two separate grips, a weight cartridge, the ability to control LED colour, and the ability to control mouse wheel style, it has an unprecedented number of hardware customization options. I found the wide grip very comfortable, with excellent choice in material. It's not nearly as large as a G5/G7, so some might not like that. Ultimately mouse comfort depends on your hand size and shape, and since this is very personal you should take all comments about comfort in reviews with a grain of salt. I like a heavy mouse; with the heaviest weights in the mouse has a very solid and smooth feel to it when its moving. As noted before, the mouse wheel can be free spinning or clicky. On most logitech mice you switch this by pushing in the wheel. Convenient, but you lose your middle click which is annoying. Here, there is a button on the bottom to switch mouse wheel styles. So, you keep the middle click in exchange for not being able to switch styles on the fly. For me this is far preferable, because I use middle click a lot, and I use the clicky style exclusively for games but flywheel otherwise so it works out. As to the actual DPI tracking of the mouse, its excellent. I'm used to the 2000 DPI G5; I found the 3200 here excessively high. However I am currently using it at 2600 and its quite amazingly precise and fun to use.
The software is incredible because... you don't need the software. To be specific, you only need the set point software to set up the mouse the way you want. After that, it works perfectly on its own. This is great if you use Linux like me because all your settings on DPI's and buttons work perfectly. You will need Windows to run the software once though, but even if you don't dual-boot getting one time access to Windows is pretty trivial in my mind. Further more, you can actually store 5 different profiles on the mouse, and switch on the fly. By choosing different LED colours for each one, you can see what mode your mouse is in at a glance. Each profile is completely independent in terms of DPI settings, buttons, everything. Another huge plus is that you can bind keystrokes to mouse buttons in each profile, and again its saved on board. Not only is this perfect for games, but it also means that you never have to deal with getting Linux to "see" a mouse button again. Just bind the button to some weird keystroke combination and you can use it as a shortcut anywhere, zero hassle.
This mouse is simply one of the most polished electronic products I've ever seen. If I had to make one negative comment, it is that I would like the mouse to be a bit bigger. However, mouse shape and size is one area where you can never please everyone so this can't be held against Logitech. However the hardware works perfectly, the software works perfectly, and they are both incredibly customizable. With the mail in rebate that was available until recently, I got this mouse at just 30 dollars. This has to be the biggest steal I've ever seen, but even at 50 dollars its an amazing purchase. Five stars, hands down.
Customer Review: Logitech G9 - The Best Option in Right-Handed Gaming Mice
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Logitech's reputation in computer accessories is long established. The G9 laser mouse is the latest high end mouse in their product family. Overall the results are positive. The good far outweighs the bad here.
Installing the mouse is easy and very "plug and play." I've tested the mouse on several systems and had luck getting it to work without the additional software. If you want to access the customizations and extra features, you will need to install the Setpoint software. This software draws complaints because of it's limited options and automatic installation of unneeded processes.
Customizing the mouse's buttons and creating profiles are both easy. The limited buttons, including the lack of midline buttons, somewhat limit the number of functions you can add to it. In addition, there is no left-handed option for this mouse.
This mouse's only real competition is the Microsoft Sidewinder gaming mouse. Microsoft SideWinder Gaming Mouse The G9, while not perfect, blows the Sidewinder away with a nicer look, better feel and high-end performance. As you might expect, it also costs more.
Pros:
+ The laser mouse and high dpi give you very good accuracy
+ The adjustable weights (four 4 gram and four 7 gram) allow you to add or remove weights from an internal tray up to 28 grams, giving you control over the mouse's feel
+ The mouse incldes 2 grips to adjust the feel in your hand; the wide grip is very comfortable and both grips have a nice smooth surface
+ You can save up to 5 profiles to the mouse's internal memory; there is a switch on the bottom to choose your profile
+ The LED lights on top can be coordinated with your profiles by color and number
+ The scroll can be used to "click" or "hyper-scroll" which allows for normal to superfast page scrolling
+ The side buttons provide easy forward/back capabilities for web browsing
+ Good for more than just gaming, with enough accuracy for digital inking and graphics applications
Cons:
- The mouse is designed for righties only and has no programmable buttons on the opposing side
- The corded connection seems out of touch; a cordless option should be possible at this price point
- Logitech's Setpoint software is a problem and is often the source of complaints
- The lack of midline buttons and other function keys limits the amount of extra functions
- The $100 price is in the range for high end mice, but not a great value in this space
- More than 2 grips would have made this mouse much better; this only gives you a wide and a normal grip
If you need a high end mouse for gaming or precision applications, this one definitely deserves a look. The adjustable weight, customization features, profiles and performance make this mouse unique among the competition. Enjoy!