With the settings at 1800 dpi (old DeathAdder) it was pretty good. A bad mouse makes this process very aggravating. When you make your selection, you need to have pretty fine control of the mouse in order to get a good clean selection of the background. The Photoshop Extract filter is an interface within Adobe Photoshop that allows you to select parts of an image to “knock out” of a background. I know this is a gaming mouse, and you’re supposed to try it with games, but the very first test I performed was my tried and true “Photoshop Extract filter test.” This is something I do fairly regularly as part of my job, and any mouse that makes this process frustrating is out the door. In messy conditions, you’d best turn down the sensitivity, because the sensor will pick up imperfections. Looking at my mousepad, it was easy to see why it was dirty and the sensor had picked up a tiny hair. At first, I didn’t like it, but then I realized it was too twitchy. The minute I adjusted the DPI to 3500 and the polling rate to 1000hz, I noticed a difference. Not much, except for the newly available DPI settings: where it used to say 1800, it now offers the choice to go all the way up to 3500dpi. I hooked up the new DeathAdder and went into the control panel to see what changed.
Just to be safe, I uninstalled the Razer software suite, downloaded the latest one, and reinstalled it. Of course, they’re not the sensor has been updated to a new 3.5g infrared sensor.
With the exception of the cord (the new one is braided, the old one was smooth rubber), they look exactly the same. So it was a bit skeptically that I took the new DeathAdder out of the (typically amazing, as Razer is wont to do) package, and set it next to my old DeathAdder. Besides looking a bit worse for the wear, the DeathAdder that’s been on my desk for over two years has held up perfectly well, and I’ve never felt the need to look elsewhere. The DeathAdder still remains my primary mouse to this day. In our original DeathAdder review, I effused praise for the “perfect balance” between the unwieldy Copperhead and the slightly anemic Krait.
Instead of fixing what ain’t broke and rebranding it, Razer made the conservative but commendable choice to update it and keep the DeathAdder name. The shape, heft, and look of the DeathAdder are basically just right. This speaks to the level of perfection that the original DeathAdder has achieved. Not known to be a company to release “2.0” revisions of products, we were somewhat surprised to discover that Razer has updated their classic DeathAdder mouse and re-released it. Razer is sort of lovingly mocked for their crazy product names from time to time, but most enthusiasts understand that Razer means business, despite their sometimes odd names (Lachesis?).