Performance

Gaming

The Ozone Xenon feels good in the hand, but it is a bit on the small side. It is easy to set up once you find a comfortable grip. A quick setup for CS:GO was found and showed that it was indeed a very precise mouse. The mice feet are not quite up to the level of other mice and that, coupled with the slight difference in height between the forward and aft feet, does not make things better. This might just be an issue on the pre-production samples, but it could have made it into the final product as well. The cure is to run the mouse on an abrasive surface like a big patch of sandpaper, but it will take a significant amount of life out of the feet.

The tracking is rock steady, just as we saw with the CM Storm Recon and the Zowie AM mouse. On our reference surface, the SteelSeries 9HD, the tracking was simply stunning. It, just like the other ADNS-3090 based mice, seems to lose a touch of precision at the max DPI setting, but that is not a big issue since I only picked up on it while doing pixel per pixel work during photo editing. The usable DPI range with perfect precision for gaming is right up to around 3000 DPI for these mice.

Tracking-wise, the Xenon is brilliant. The Avago ADNS-3090 sensor is a piece of gaming perfection with a moderate DPI and polling rate. Its only pitfall is the lift-off distance which varies with surface color, sensor implementation, and firmware setup. Ozone has gone for a pretty standard setup and seems to use the reference lens, which means it performs well throughout. Lift-off-distance is around 2 mm for most surfaces, which is low enough to ensure that it is not annoying. There are no means to adjust this value with the Xenon so it was, thankfully, tweaked well to begin with.


Its main rival is the CM Storm Recon mouse since both sell for roughly the same price. The obvious difference is that the Xenon is less flashily designed while also missing those side buttons. The button mechanism for the main buttons on the Xenon is less edgy than those on the Recon. The core performance of the Xenon is just as good as that of the CM Storm Recon, but the fact that it lacks side buttons is mind bogglingly annoying!

The mouse is quite comfortable to use, even for a guy with large hands. It is no Mionix NAOS 5000, but it does well against the CM Storm Recon in that regard. The fact that the grip is less forced on the Xenon makes it a bit more comfortable to use for extended periods of time. It is not quite on par with the Zowie AM mouse in terms of grip, but it is pretty darn close.

The Xenon has on the fly DPI adjustment capability via the opaque back-lit button just south of the scroll wheel. It works well and shifts DPI very quickly. It is totally usable in-game, and you just have to get used to where the button is placed.

Driver

The driver is unusually lightweight since it only has two screens and hardly any options. That you can only tweak DPI settings baffles me, especially because this mouse is supposed to compete with mice like the CM Storm Recon and the mid-end mice by SteelSeries. The driver suite does load fast, but it just seems a bit too simple for its own good. Adding such sensor adjustments as LOD settings seems a must do for the next version of the driver; its current revision is 1.0.