Gone are the years when we used these wooden ball mice that had to be taken apart every few minutes to clean them and whose accuracy was more than questionable. And it is that the arrival of optical mice completely changed the landscape, but at the same time introduced a new technical feature: DPI. who at a glance measure the level of precision Mouse. However, this is not 100% the case and this number is more related to how a contemporary pointer works. But also with the level of performance that we can expect from it depending on the different applications and games that we are going to use.
What is DPI and what does it mean in mouse specifications?
the acronym PPP are an English acronym that means stitch per inch, translated into Spanish in dots per inch, so it is a density rate. Now, that alone tells us nothing. We must therefore start from the fact that we move our mouse over a surface and that an inch is precisely a measure of distance. So we need to know what we mean by the concept of points.
You will have noticed that your optical mouse always one led light. Well, the reason it’s there is because your mouse has what we call a camera internally. Who records the surface on which he moves and because his own body covers the light necessary for said camera to record, then said light is necessary.
On the other hand, the camera used is not designed to obtain a color image, but operates with a gray scale and with a very wide refresh rate. That is to say, it can take up to 1000 frames per second in some cases. That it stores in its microcontroller to be able to interpret the movement of the pointer. That is, in a 1000 Hz mouse, the PC will receive 1000 times the position change in one second, which will allow the computer to make a 1: 1 correlation of the movement of our hand with the mouse and the point of the same that is seen on the screen.
Are dots the same as pixels?
If we look at a screen and count the different colored dots, then we can say that each point is a pixel, but this does not happen with cameras, because the same image captured by a sensor can be converted into an image with more or fewer pixels. You will have observed it by taking a photo with your mobile and when saving it in storage it asks you what size you want to store it. Either way, the image is the same, but the resolution, which is the number of pixels, is different.
When we talk about DPI, we are referring to a measure comes from the world of printing, where we are talking about the number of ink dots per inch. And believe us, if we were to scan an image from an analog photo taken by an old-fashioned film camera and make each of the ink dots a pixel in its digital version, then the resolution would be within many cases an order of magnitude higher than its resolution digital counterparts. Of course, in a mouse, we should be talking about PPI or pixels per inch, so that’s a really bad use of the acronym. That is, while dots and pixels are different, in the context of optical mice, if we are talking about DPI and PPI we would be talking about the same thing and they are interchangeable terms.
Why does a mouse use the DPI value?
In the case of optical mice, it is very important to sensor quality, since the camera used is however very rudimentary. It is the sensor that is responsible for taking this information to perform the corresponding calculations. Which is done transparently even to the PC, which is just waiting to know where the mouse is at all times.
Inside the mouse is a microcontroller, this is a very small processor that always recursively executes the same program on information from the mouse camera. Well when the camera the mouse records the surface over which it moves number each pixel or point in the mesh. In such a way that you can know with a simple derivative of the speed how much a point has moved from one image to another according to the period of time. That is, it allows you to know the speed at which we move the mouse on the surface and, therefore, we can calculate the speed at which we move the pointer.
The only difference is that when we’re talking about a higher number of DPI, then, the number of points to compare is greater and with it, gain in precision when calculating speed. And it is that to represent the movement of any body, it is not enough to know its position of origin and destination, but how said displacement in time occurred and, therefore, its speed. Obviously, this information is not necessary, because once all the process inside our mouse is finished, it results in sending the necessary information to the CPU.
How does the amount of DPI affect application performance?
With all the operations explained and once you know what DPI is for in a mouse, we are left with the key question: how much more better? And the answer to that depends on application and the number of profiles supported by the pointer. Since there will be applications where a specific speed will be the one with which the best control will be obtained, especially in video games where you will have to adjust the value until you find the one with which you are most at ease. ease to control your favorite game.
In this case we must take into account the concept eDPI, which means “effective points per inch” and is obtained by multiplying the DPI of the mouse by the sensitivity that we have adjusted in the game itself. This allows us to fully understand the sensitivity with which we are actually playing the game. For example, if we have player A with a DPI of 1200 and a sensitivity of 4 then his eDPI will be 4800 and therefore the same as player B with an 800 DPI mouse and a sensitivity of 6. So both will end up having the same precision when playing the same game.
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