In the gaming mouse market, the manufacturer PixArt is sure to be familiar to you, since like OMRON when it comes to switches, it is a manufacturer that stands out in the field of sensors for gaming mice. That a mouse has a PixArt sensor is usually synonymous with precision and quality, but is it always like this? Why does this manufacturer have such a good reputation? In this article we are going to go into it in depth to find out if its sensors are really as good as they promise .
The mouse is possibly the PC peripheral that has undergone the most changes in its history, and with the proliferation of the gaming ecosystem, the industry had to evolve to stop using those archaic “ball” mice to use more precise sensors that would provide what players needed. Thus, in 2003 came the first commercial optical sensor mouse designed for games, the Microsoft Intellimouse, but let’s dig a little deeper to see how this story began and ended.
PixArt is a world leader in optical CMOS sensors
As we said, in the early 2000s was when optical sensors for mice began to proliferate on the market, and it led to a kind of struggle between the main manufacturers to see who was capable of developing the best technology that would provide the best precision. At the end of the decade, this fight was between Avago (now Broadcom), which in 2006 had the largest market share in this regard, and PixArt, which began in 1998 as a small company fighting against the big ones.
At that time, both companies were involved in a patent fight for the optical sensors used in PC mice, a battle in style that ended years later with the victory of the Taiwanese company and that placed it as the world leader in optical CMOS sensors by having the vast majority of patents. From that moment on, the rest of the sensor manufacturers were displaced by not being able to use the PixArt Imaging patents, and at that time most of the “gaming” mice on the market equipped their sensors.
As the undisputed industry leader, the company began flooding the market with mice equipped with its sensors, and models like the PWM 3310 were seen as the “bare minimum” for an optical mouse to be considered gaming-grade. From that model, obviously the company has been adapting and improving its sensor and launching new, increasingly advanced models on the market.
Hegemony sparked competition
With PixArt positioned as the manufacturer that had the vast majority of patents in optical sensors for mice, and more so for gaming, the rest of the manufacturers had to make a living and invest in R&D to be able to produce their own sensors without infringing patents. , that were competitive in terms of performance, and with the aim of being able to launch models on the market with their own sensors that would be cheaper than having to go through the box to pay royalties to PixArt.
Thus, today not all gaming mice have a PixArt sensor and, in fact, even though it is a well-recognized manufacturer, it does not have the best gaming sensors on the market. Currently we can see the TrueMove sensors from SteelSeries, Focus + or 5G from Razer or the HERO from Logitech that have an even better performance than PixArt’s top of the range and that are manufactured and developed in-house.
In summary, PixArt is one of the most famous and recognized manufacturers for its optical sensors for gaming mice, but this is so due to its history and the number of patents they have, but this does not mean that their sensors are the best on the market and this It has already been demonstrated with the first-order brands that we have mentioned in the previous paragraph.
However, this does not mean that the PixArt sensors are bad at all, since in fact they provide excellent performance and even more so if we talk about the latest generation; they simply have excellent sensors but they are not the only ones, the competition has surpassed them and this is always good because it means that they will continue to invest to improve their sensors and get back on top, something that ultimately always benefits us users because the result will be sensors with increasingly better performance.
