SteelSeries Sensei Pro Grade Laser Mouse (PC)

Pre-ordered this mouse when it was first available here (arguably was cheaper than it is now current, whats up with that?) and have been using it for about a week, and boy is it a great mouse.

I was a bit sceptical about the ambidextrous design (i.e. its symmetrical so both left and right handed players can use it)but once I got it in my hand it was brilliant. I'll try and give both my initial impressions and my impressions after a week of use.

Initial Impressions:

The Good:

The Sensei is one badass looking mouse. While looks are nice, they arent important, however the metal finish (or convincingly high quality plastic) is a really nice touch. It will definitely outlast my Razer Deathadder that after 3 years started to peel off the platic matte finish. It made it look very sloppy and the edges where the plastic was peeling off were not comfortable. There isnt anything I can predict to have a similar fate with this mouse!

As much as I initially didn't care that I could change the colour of the steelseries logo, mouse wheel and whatever that dot light is above the mouse wheel, I actually really enjoy being able to customize it to my liking. In the first week I changed it a couple of times and it feels fresh each time.

The great thing about the design is that unlike my DeathAdder with its matte plastic finish, this mouse is very easy to clean. As a typical university student I'm quite messy and eat by my computer (shame) leaving my hands often unclean. It is so much simpler to wipe the Sensei clean!

Lastly the size is not only good, but unlike other gaming mice, the sensei is actually really really light. Its large so you feel you have a lot of precision with the mouse, but because it weighs something like half of the DeathAdder, my experience in FPS and RTS games is much better with a lighter mouse!

The Bad:

I've never had a mouse with side buttons on the right AND the left. As a right handed person I have yet to work out an optimal way to press them. I wouldn't put this a downside of the intrinsic design, but my own problem. So if you are looking for a mouse with more buttons but havent used pinky buttons you might have some getting used to.

The customizable lights are quite poor with darker colours. It being an LED this is quite obvious, but none-the-less something people might overlook. So if you want to have a dark grey I'm afraid you're all out of luck, but hopefully there are more colours in the spectrum that suit your fancy.

I really can't think of anything concretely bad about this mouse. Yes it is expensive and may likely have some features you don't want. But if you are really want the best mouse, one that will last and you wont have to upgrade until your hair goes grey, then this will certainly be a worthy investment!

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A last bit of warning, I've seen some concerns in the past with some of steelseries' laser mice like the Xai not working optimally with steelseries' own mousepads. I have no idea if this issue has been resolved with the sensei, but I have had absolutely no tracking difficulties with my current mousepad that seems to he in terms of design specifics very similar to the steelseries pads.

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In conclusion it really seems that Steelseries has put in a lot of heart, time and soul into this product. Changing over to the Sensei gave me the same wonderful sensation as when I switched to a mechanical keyboard. It really does feel like an improvement to any of the large number of mice I've owned in the past. The pro-gamers they used to test this mouse must've given some fantastic feedback because this is the best mouse I've ever owned hands down. If you want to buy the premium mouse out there to end all other mice, then you need to look no further.

[Unfortunately] I wasnt paid to write this review, this however, I hope, gives me credibility as an unprejudiced reviewer.

Background \____________________________________
I'm into semi-competitive PC/console gaming for about 4-5 years now. I don't like spending big money just to have a popular logo on my equipment, but I'm always willing to pay extra for something that is worth it (read: performance/usability/durability).

Review \________________________________________
At the moment I received the product I was very pleased. The packaging had a premium feel to it, which somehow convinced me that my purchase was worth the money. After I unpacked the mouse, I realised that it is very light weight - my previous mouse was wireless and was considerably heavier. At first it was somehow an issue, since I felt like I have no control over the mouse movements, but I soon got used to it. The mouse can be used by both left and right handed people.

The sides of the mouse are covered with rubberised material, which gives nice grip and prevents from sweating. The same can NOT be said about the supposedly metal top (which in fact is made of plastic). The silver part of the mouse is the best sweat/dirt/dust collector I have ever seem in my life - I spend majority of the day using my PC (gaming/browsing/working) and I must say that washing my hands even 10x a day will not save you from seeing your mouse all tacky (so get ready to clean it more often than you would clean a pet mouse). Makes me wonder where all that dirt was going on my previous mouses, since I never noticed anything like that before and I would only need an occasional dust-wipe (I just checked, and my last mouse didn't smell weird or anything lol).

The braided cable seems durable, but is not very flexible - if you have a lot of space on your desk it shouldn't be a problem, however on more crowded desks (like mine, where the cable runs close to HiFi speakers and the wall behind the desk) the cable is stiff enough to make you feel the resistance - that can go to the point where if you let go of the mouse, it then gets moved up to 5-8cm (1.9-3 inch) by the cable.

All buttons on the mouse click nicely - not much effort is needed, but I didn't yet click anything accidentally. Except for the DPI switch, all buttons can be programmed. The DPI switch is a very nice feature, that lets you switch between two different sensitivity settings, which can be useful during game play (i.e. when switching between precision and fast weapon, such as sniper and sub-machine gun) and work (i.e. graphics software). However this button is way too close to the centre of the mouse (at least for me) as it is very uncomfortable to click it with index finger - as you need to bend it as if you wanted to touch the middle knuckle of your middle finger, therefore I use it very rarely.
The side buttons are only comfortable to use on one side (the side where your thumb rests) and you might need finger-yoga lessons if you wanted to be able to use all four side buttons.

Connecting the mouse to my computer was a smooth experience - it just worked right after getting plugged in. The LCD screen underneath the mouse can be used to switch profiles and adjust the mouse ( DPI, path correction, acceleration, polling rate and lift off - note: even though there is a cpu on the mouse, you can only apply changes while the mouse is plugged to a machine running Windows/Mac OS. Users of Linux system will not be able to change any settings regardless of the fact that the mouse has it's own settings panel- also the mouse will only work as the standard left/right button+scroll mouse). To change the other settings you need Engine software. It has improved in many ways compared to what it was when I got the mouse. It is still far from perfect, however. Macro recording is OK, but macro edition is very basic/limited. Currently the Engine software reserves one of five available on-board profiles - which sucks, because instead of five you can only store four of your own profiles- in the way they just stole something you paid for (kind of like Sony removing Linux support from PS3, which was the reason for many to get the console over something else, but don't get me started on this^^ ), in order to cheap-fix their design mistake.
This mouse also has three illumination zones (scroll, dpi switch and logo). SteelSeries advertises that the LED lights can generate 16,800,000 colours - now if you are tempted to get this mouse because of the colour customisations (and there is nothing wrong with that- I love customisations myself) then you should perhaps look somewhere else, or get this mouse and get disappointed. Honestly 16.8 million colours is just b-s**t. You can't even get real white colour (duh, not like their logo is actually white so it would make sense) - you get light pink colour. Any light colour usually gets a tint of pink to it. The only colours that the LEDs on this mouse show correctly (as they appear in the Engine software) are the nine pre-set colours: Red, Orange, Light orange, YellowGreen, Green, Deep Pink, Pink, Blue, SkyBlue, Cyan. Any other 'custom' setting will basically look as if you picked the colour, and then a trained colour-blind SteelSeries officer told your mouse which colour it should use... Upon contacting SteelSeries support I was at first ignored, then told some irrelevant stuff (such as: don't use computer's sleep mode, make sure power-savings are off) and then finally they admitted that it doesn't "accurately" displays the colours and that something will be done about it. Time passed, nothing has changed for the past 4-5 Engine updates, however they took my suggestions and put them into new Sensei RAW mouses (rubberised surface, white LED and white only-which makes me think it was beyond them to have proper colour display, pulsing light effects, removed cpu since nobody right in mind is going to use 1 DPI or 11,400 DPI settings - and by the way any setting over 5,700 DPI on Sensei involves firmware adjustments and thus horrible tracking). The SteelSeries customer support deserves less than zero stars and I will definitely not get anything else from them, as I don't feel like talking with monkeys who only care about future customers and lie right in your face. Arrrg... anyway...

Tracking on this mouse is OK, but you definitely need a special mouse mat/pad. My previous optical mouse would be fine with just about anything, but this laser mouse tends to have random jumps/freezes unless it is on a nice surface. Now there comes another problem- it appears that there is some negative acceleration on cloth pads. I am a fan of cloth pads since they are comfortable and give a little cushioning for your wrist, however to achieve the best performance I bought a 9HD mouse mat from SteelSeries. Let's just say that it was designed specifically for laser mice, however there was so much friction between the mouse and the surface that it was tiring to game for more than 2 hours. Very surprisingly the tracking wasn't exceptionally good either and the cursor was jumpy on certain parts of the mat (the surface of the mat was somehow like a plastic version of motorway) not to mention that the gliders on the mouse got scratched. For the past 3 months I had some no-brand hybrid surface that was working exceptionally well with this mouse, but it has now started to get bumps and is pretty useless at the moment. Since I don't want to buy a mouse mat that cost almost as much as my mouse itself to have desired tracking, I had to return the product, but if you are lucky to find a good mouse mat you might just love it.

Conclusion \____________________________________
In my opinion this mouse was a big step forward and backward at the same time compared to my optical mouse. Specification wise, it was supposed to be much better than anything I had before, but in real-life test it did just average. After 5+ months of use, there were no visible signs of wear - this mouse received a lot of "love" from me and was well looked after though. "Superior" sensor didn't really show me that much of a difference compared to old optical mouse, but sure was picky about the surfaces. The scroll lost some of it's resistance and became somehow loose. I would definitely expect more from a mouse with such a price-tag and more than anything, would like the words of the manufacturer to be truth - fortunately enough places like Amazon allow us to share experiences with other people, so we can judge ourselves how much we should trust the people who make all that "professional" gear or rather make a lot of fuss and harvest double the money from just average things. I would also suggest no to believe anything that company's associated gamers say - ofc they will say it's great. Just like game-testers (my friend) who are supposed to find problems with games, but get a dead eye from developers when they say a bad word- want to keep the job, say it's amazing ^^ I hope this rather lengthy review will help you making your decision.

Very happy with it. Found the installation of the software and drivers slightly not straight forward, but got it working in no time at the end. Because there are so many options and every little thing is configurable on this mouse it took me a bit of time to know my way around the software configuration of the mouse and how to create profiles and configure micros for some of the buttons. I'm loving this mouse and it's one of the best products I bought recently for the money i paid here at Amazon compared to the market price.