(Special Report) - There’s finally some good news from Logitech in regards to laser technology in its G5 and G7 laser mice, and the surface tracking issues they were prone to. On November 24th, Logitech issued a firmware upgrade for G5, the wired counterpart to the cordless G7. While we appreciate Logitech’s stance against the issue, and its decision to release a firmware upgrade to remedy the problem, what has us confused is a sudden change in Logitech’s strategy.

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When we first published our review of the G7 laser mouse, we received quite a few e-mails that forwarded us to threads in Logitech’s technical support forums and user comments that discussed surface tracking issues users were having with G5 and G7 gaming mice. Though we had not encountered those issues internally, we found surface tracking to be a fairly common phenomenon with laser mice. Due to the requests we received, we contacted Logitech and requested them to shed light on the issue.

Logitech kindly admitted to the problem, but during our interview, which was conducted about two weeks ago, the peripherals maker said technical support calls were at an all time low regarding the problem, which meant that users were finding ways to medicate the drawback themselves. Since we were aware of Razer’s idea of issuing a firmware upgrade to correct anomalies in its laser mice, we asked Logitech if it could do the same. At that time (remember we had a discussion with Logitech only two weeks ago), Logitech said the company would not issue a firmware upgrade due to quality assurance of its products. Instead, it recommended that users call Logitech’s technical support personnel who will work with its customers to optimize the mice as best as they could. If technical support failed, the users had no choice but to opt for a compatible mousepad.

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