According to ign.com:
August 09, 2005 - The RAZER mouse brand is one that is practically synonymous with first-person shooters. In fact, old-school gamers may fondly remember the original RAZER Boomslang from back in the heyday of Quake. Targeted at high-speed precision, the mouse was generally a hit with the first-person shooter enthusiast crowd.
Fast-forward a couple years later to the RAZER Boomslang 2000. This model was a high-precision mouse that worked quite well, though at that point users were shifting over to optical mice and the Boomslang 2000 still made use of the dying ball design.
RAZER’s last two mice have brought optical technology to the table, first with the RAZER Viper, and then with its RAZER Diamondback. Much like its past mouse designs, the Diamondback is aimed at giving gamers, and especially first-person shooter fans, the best precision possible in a fast design.
RAZER’s newest product is a special edition release of its Diamondback line, the RAZER Diamondback Plasma LE (for Limited Edition). It sports the same technical specs and physical design as its standard Diamondback counterparts but brings a nifty blue look to the table with an invisible tracking system – you can’t see its optical sensor. Again, RAZER promises best-of-the-best performance with its Plasma LE.
Deliverance
Does it deliver on these goals? Absolutely. The mouse is extrememly precise, regardless of which surface we tried using it on. That included a RatPad (an old favorite), a few different desk surfaces, a crappy mousepad and a bunch of other random surfaces, like one of our legs. Well, maybe it doesn’t work so well on a leg, but it did work better than any other mouse we’ve tried on it.
The RAZER Diamondback Plasma LE’s specs put it at a 1600dpi resolution, capturing 5.8 megapixels per second at 6400+ [url=“http://gear.ign.com/articles/640/640344p1.html#”]frames per second. It theoretically works at up to 40 inches per second, but as we never tried to fling the mouse 3 1/3 feet from our desks, we didn’t test that. What we will say is that no matter how quickly we moved the Diamondback Plasma LE, we got exactly the response we would expect. In fact, it worked so well that if it was skipping or missing movement, we were moving the mouse so violently that it was impossible for us to tell.
Again, this mouse is extremely precise and works without flaw. Its only nemesis are large dust bunnies. Damned bunnies…
The mouse wheel also works and feels great. You can definitely feel the notches as it scrolls, but it’s very smooth. There isn’t really much clicking involvement in its movement. The Diamondback’s wheel seems to hit the perfect spot for us. We usually find most mice either have a wheel that is too loose, making it too difficult to tell how many segments you’ve scrolled, which makes switching weapons a pain since you skip over some, or it’s too tight and clicky, making it hard to quickly switch items, weapons or menu items.
