Power
Manufacturers often engineer their optical mice—especially battery-powered wireless models—to save power when possible. To do this, the mouse dims or blinks the laser or LED when in standby mode (each mouse has a different standby time). A typical implementation (by Logitech) has four power states, where the sensor is pulsed at different rates per second:
- 11500: full on, for accurate response while moving, illumination appears bright.
- 1100: fallback active condition while not moving, illumination appears dull.
- 110: standby
- 12: sleep state
Movement can be detected in any of these states; some mice turn the sensor fully off in the sleep state, requiring a button click to wake.
Optical mice utilizing infrared elements (LEDs or lasers) offer substantial increases in battery life. Some mice, such as the Logitech V450 848 nm laser mouse, are capable of functioning on two AA batteries for a full year, due to the low power requirements of the infrared laser.
Mice designed for use where low latency and high responsiveness are important, such as in playing video games, may omit power-saving features to improve performance.
Read more about this topic: Optical Mouse
Famous quotes containing the word power:
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the last twentieth century, we see that our poverty is as absolute as that of the poorest nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need.”
—Robert Neelly Bellah (20th century)
“The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)