By: Aaron Lai
June 2, 2017
As some of you readers may know, I have a sister who is three years older than me. Due to this age gap, I never was in the same school as her once she left elementary school until we were both in university. As the younger one, I sometimes end up with the same teachers as my sister. Whenever this happened, the teacher would ask, "Your name is Aaron Lai... is your sibling (A random name) Lai?" I would always laugh this off and reply no. It was quite rare if the teacher could actually guess who my sister was, and I think only my band teachers knew I was related to my sister. More recently, the company I am working for hired an intern with the same last name. Upon finding this out, one of my co-workers turned to me and jokingly said, "Hey Aaron, is this your cousin?" While some might see this as a bit racist, I do not feel offended at this, because to me it is either a joke or an actual question. In addition, it is very possible we are cousins, except very long lost, haha. Names are a peculiar thing in the fact they often have some sort of meaning or purpose, and thus similarly named items will cause people to expect some sort of relationship between the two things. Today, we have the ROCCAT Kone Pure Owl-Eye at APH Networks. Sharing the same Kone name as the recently reviewed Kone EMP, a very natural question would be to ask what is similar and different between the two mice. We had a generally very positive conclusion with the EMP, so I can only hope the Pure Owl-Eye is just as excellent. Thankfully, now is the time to find out, so let us get on with it!
Today's review unit of the ROCCAT Kone Pure Owl-Eye arrived from Ontario, California, which is a small suburb east of Los Angeles. When it arrived, I actually thought it arrived from the province of Ontario in Canada, but obviously I realized this was weird considering this would mean there is no city on the shipping sticker. Traveling with USPS and Canada Post in their respective countries, the box arrived in relatively good condition with little to no issues to be concerned about. Along with the Kone Pure Owl-Eye, we also received an Isku+ Force FX, which fellow editor Ben Joubert will be reviewing in the coming weeks. Once again, my colleagues Jonathan Kwan and Ben Joubert thought it would be funny to be in the photo, but I think they are just out-standing at their job, haha.
As you can see, ROCCAT has a pretty similar retail box across their products, as both the Isku+ Force FX and the Kone Pure Owl-Eye share a blue and black box design. As for the mouse, the box is not exactly a rectangular prism with the right side cut down. ROCCAT's logo can be found here on the side in a glossy print. The top also shows the product's name. ROCCAT refers to this as the Kone Pure, or even the Kone Pure 2017, as this is actually their second mouse with the same name. In my review, I will stick to the Kone Pure Owl-Eye for consistency's sake. The front panel shows the product inside with the line "Champion Grade" underneath. Otherwise, one big thing ROCCAT is offering with this mouse is the 12K DPI Owl-Eye optical sensor, which is the same sensor as the one featured in last week's ROCCAT mouse, the Kone EMP. We will see how these two compare later on in our review. The back side of the box has several more specifications and features of the Kone Pure Owl-Eye.
Before continuing on, I have grabbed the specifications from the manufacturer for your perusal:
Specifications
ROCCAT® Owl-Eye optical sensor with 12000dpi
1000Hz polling rate
1ms response time
ROCCAT® exclusive 50 Mio. lifecycle switches
50G acceleration
250ips maximum speed
Mouse acceleration: no
Angle snapping: no
Adjustable lift-off distance
ARM Cortex-M0 50MHz
512kB onboard memory
1.8m braided USB cable
As we let the ROCCAT out of the bag, you can see there are not a whole lot of extras coming with the Kone Pure Owl-Eye. First is the mouse, which is held in a plastic shell for protection. Next, we have several books of documentation. I must say, these small manuals are printed on really nice paper, though I guess that is not a huge surprise either. Finally, there are some ROCCAT stickers for plastering up your case or other things should you so desire. For your information, ROCCAT offers a two year warranty for the Kone Pure Owl-Eye, which is pretty standard for gaming peripherals.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look - Hardware and Software
3. Subjective Performance Tests
4. Conclusion
