Kensington Expert Mouse - Wired Ergonomic TrackBall Mouse for PC, Mac and Windows with Scroll Ring, Ambidextrous Design and Optical Tracking - Grey (64325)

UPDATE 24 FEB 2011 Here is an update to my original review. I just as keen on this excellent input device as I was a year ago when I bought it. It has been in constant use and it really is imho the best input device I have ever used. I use it for graphics, mostly in Adobe Illustrator for example and there is so much control and it is precise. Equally it can go very quickly across screens so I can get across my two screens easily. I also use it for editing video in Final Cut Pro and here, it is really superb. It's great big trackball makes it very easy to just creep forward and back a frame at a time. I really do think that people may overlook this terrific input device because it is not slick and cool, but it is very much the best possible thing for the job. My only comment that could be negative, but isn't, is that using it exclusively may risk RSI problems with you shoulder. I think this is true of any mouse of this sort. That is why I also use the Contour RollerMouse Free. This I use for scrolling around word processing documents and that kind of thing. ORIGINAL REVIEW MARCH 2010 I bought mine on 30 January so I've had it for six weeks now. I absolutely love it! I do not use it exclusively, I use it in conjunction with a Contour RollerMouse Free. However I use the Kensington Expert Mouse for graphics. I recently just finished doing a lot of editing of a video with Final Cut Express and the Expert Mouse is superb for this kind of thing. Many years ago I used a Kensington trackball, I think in about 1995, and I really like that one, but this is so much better because it has such a large trackball. The negative things about this trackball are that it feels a bit cheap in construction compared with say, a Logitech or Microsoft mouse at this price, however I think it is well constructed nevertheless. It looks rather 70s to me but I don't mind this. In actual use the feel is very good. The scroll wheel bearing surface is noisy in a plasticy way but there is no problem with this in use. From time to time it is a good idea to remove a build up of gunge on the three little ball bearings. I keep an old toothbrush nearby for this purpose. It's also quite good to take the ball out and polish it, perhaps with your shirt :) Any of these small negatives are hugely outweighed by the fact that the level of control over the cursor is superb. That is what an input device like this is for and that is what it does so well. Before I got this I tried the most expensive Logitech mouse, however the software for that on my Mac was a disaster so I had to send it back. IMHO the Kensington Expert Mouse is a far better buy than that more expensive Logitech mouse. The level of control over the cursor is much better. The software for the Kensington Expert Mouse works very well indeed on my Mac. I use it with the default settings and it is fine. The scroll direction can be switched with a menu in the menu bar at the top of the Mac OS screen and this is very handy. If you buy this you will be initially disappointed when you take it out of the packaging. You will think it is a prop from the Star Wars movie. When you first use it you will think it is a bit weird if you have not used a trackball before. You will still be having doubts. After a week of using it you will never want to use a "normal" mouse again!

After having used the left/right-handed Logitech Marble Mouse pretty happily for six years why has this monster just become my new best friend? The snooker sized ball is massive and comfortable. It sits very well right next to the keyboard, the wrist rest encourages a very natural and ergonomic sitting position. The Logitech's design always had me wanting to be able to incline it sideways off the desk at an angle. Most of Logitech's right-handed-only models do cradle the hand at a slight angle. The ambidextrous model however doesn't. Presumably this is so they can flog more of these units to both left and right handers rather than simply make just ONE of their products for lefties, ok, rant over. The Kensington's large ball allows you to alter the angle at which your hand sits, as a far larger area of your fingers makes contact with the ball. A lot of other reviewers of this product on other sites say a great deal about the hardware so there's no point re-hashing that here other than to agree it does feel a bit on the cheap and plasticy side, but that said personally, I'd much rather something that's well made and works well than something that just looks good. The hardware is however only part of the story. It's the software that comes bundled with this that really makes the difference. You can easily program each of the 4 buttons and assign functions both the top two buttons and the bottom two buttons being pressed simultaneously too which effectively increases the number of buttons to six. The functions you can ascribe these buttons is extremely impressive, things I'd never have thought of as mouse functions. One click can bring up a really nifty `alt-tab' alternative. You can program any button to emulate any keyboard presses, so anything from entering a string of text to say Windows-D-ing or Windows-E-ing. You can even create your own right click menus. The mouse buttons can also be told to function differently within different programs. I've only just started using this but I knew in an instant that this is a really nice bit of kit.

I like the mouse because it gives you a different approach to working with your hand, especially if you've got carpal syndrome issues. For details like clicking on anchor points in Adobe Illustrator, it can be really frustrating, so I use it more for editing and other work than working in Illustrator or Photoshop. If you try to draw with it, good luck, I couldn't draw anything nice. The mouse itself is quite big (I have small hands) and comes with a pad that I don't like too much so instead of using the pad I use my own mouse pad that has a silicone wrist protector, which is softer. I would recommend buying it, but definitely not for gaming or sorts of work that require fast accuracy. The positive thing about the mouse is that you can program all four buttons around the ball (you can program each button, and define what it does if you click two of them simultaneously too. It is great for browsing the net though because it has a spinning wheel around the ball which works great when you need to scroll a page - you can also zoom in and zoom out using it. I would rather see it it would be flat, but if I compare it to SlimBlade (which I don't have), I think the Expert Kensington with a spinning wheel wins the battle. My wrist definitely feels much better using this mouse and combining the work with a graphic pen and other mouses help a lot. Would recommend the seller!

I am really struggling to find a mouse/trackball that suits my hand size, I have very large hands and long fingers. I have tried various mice and trackballs and none do the job for me in terms of comfort for long periods of use, I always end up with pain in the fingers, wrist, forearm or shoulder. Sometimes in multiple of places at the same time. Kensington Expert Mouse - With this, I find that my hand always wants to lean over to the right towards my little finger, so then my index finger is only on the ball, I then end up curling my fingers up to rotate the ball, button placement is just plain awkward for me, I can use the left click with my thumb OK, but others I have to look to see where they are. I also find that without the supplied wrist rest that my hand is tilted upwards from the wrist to much. With the supplied rest it is too easy for my hand to slide forward and then have the ball in the palm of may hand. The scroll ring works fine. I also had to download and install Mouseworks for XP as no software supplied, which works well. There is also Trackballworks software for XP/Vista/7 but I did not try that. Overall it is is a good trackball and works well but just not for comfortable enough for me. Others I have tried the following:- Evoluent Vertical Mouse 4 - Good concept, held arm/wrist in a better position, but too small and fingers still get curled up using the buttons and mouse wheel, hand does not sit in the place it is designed to so ends up with the little finger running on the desk and hence causing pain. 3M Ergonomic Optical Mouse Large - Again a good concept holding arm/wrist in a better position, again it is too small for my hand and holding it in position designed for cramps my little finger against the base of the mouse causing pins and needles. Mouse wheel replacement(button) does not work in a lot of software so makes it useless, also uses standard windows mouse driver and you have to wind the mosue speed up full to get it to do anything, then making normal mice useless as they are too fast. Logitech Marble Mouse - So far this has been the most comfortable to use, but is not very accurate. Normal mice - I end up gripping the sides of the mouse with thumb and little finger, other fingers curled up to use buttons and scroll wheel. Wacom Tablets - takes a long time to adjust to the completely different way of working and I end up with severe pains in my hand from gripping the pen, which I do get with a normal pen and after a while my accuracy has gone all over the place. So I have spent a lot of maoney on variosu mice/trackballs and all to some degree or another are just not good enough for my size hands. Back to the drawing board, with pain in fingers/wrist/forearm and shoulder :(

I am a programmer, and spend a lot of time in front of computers: I generally use a computer for 7 hours each day at work, and also use one a lot in the evenings at home too. For the past few years I have been experiencing muscle twitches and spasms in my arms and hands, especially in periods where I have spent extra time on the computer. A while back I decided to buy a trackball, and bought a Logitech thumb trackball. I really liked it, but after a while some of the buttons stopped working properly, and I also found it difficult to move the ball forwards and backwards with the same speed and accuracy as I could move it side to side. A few months ago, I bought one of these trackballs to use at work, and I absolutely love it! I find it so much easier to use than the thumb trackball, and I find it easy to use with my left and right hand, which means that I can switch hands when I get twitches or pains. A week after buying this I bought another one to use at home so now I own 2! A lot of people have complained about the scroll wheel feeling cheap and scratchy, and I even read somewhere that it feels like it has sand inside it! This is definitely true when you first buy the unit, and it still does feel like that to some extent, but the action of the scroll wheel gets better and better as you use it and feels much more fluid. I have used this trackball with both Linux (Ubuntu) and Max OSX and it works fine with both of them. The (unofficial) Ubuntu driver is brilliant, as I can set one of the buttons to be a scroll button. If I tap it, I have set it to navigate backwards, but if I hold it down then the main ball works like a scroll wheel which is really smooth. Unfortunately you can't do this with the Mac driver and I don't know if this is possible on Windows. Overall this is the best 'mouse' I have ever owned for general usage (I have a regular mouse for gaming still), and takes up a lot less space on my desk than a regular mouse as I don't have to move it around. I don't think this has cured my RSI on its own, but it definitely helps as I can switch back and forth between this, my thumb trackball and a normal mouse depending on the state of my hands. I 100% prefer this to a thumb trackball. Edit: 5 Years later this thing is still going perfectly. The mouse wheel is smooth, I get less weird muscle twitches in my thumb and it's a joy to use. I definitely recommend this.

I've had this rollerball for a couple of months now. I've used it for work and at home. I orginally bought this device because I was getting wrist pain working for 8 hours at an office computer monday to friday. I can say after switching away from the traditional mouse has cleared that wrist pain right up. About the product itself, I enjoy the size of of the ball, buttons are in the right place and feel sturdy. It came with a detachable wrist-rest too which is a must have in my opinion, without it the ball and buttons seem too high from the desk. The accuracy of the mouse control with the device is excellent, takes some getting used to compared to the traditional mouse but after a while its fine. It does feel a little slower than using a normal mouse however, and that is fine for work related tasks, but a certainly would not be playing any video games with it. I don't imagine that is its intended use anyway either. The software the device comes with is great too. Very customizable, you can adjust settings regarding how the mouse behaves in relation to the ball's movement, things like speed, sensitivity etc. It has four buttons which are fully customizable with a wide array of options too via the software. If you've read this far then you'll probably be wondering whats the catch. Whilst everything else on this product seems top quality the biggest let down, as other reviewers have said too, is the scroll wheel. I honestly don't know how it got past kensington's quality testing because it is downright glaringly awful. You do get used to it after a while, such that it isn't really as big an issue, but in the context of reviewing the product it really needs to be said. The scroll wheel is grindy and stiff. When you rotate it, you can hear the scrapping of plastic as it rotates, its not a smooth experience. I actually open the product up and used plastic-friendly silicone lubricant to try and loosen it up. I checked to see if there was any screw tightnesses which may be causing the problem too but it hasn't helped that much. On further inspection the scroll wheel sits on top of three small plastic ball-bearings. Taking the scroll wheel housing out of the device does make it rotate more freely but when you reassemble the product, the stiffness returns. Its definately some kind of design flaw with the plastic rotation mechanism. Overall I'd still recommend the product. Whilst the scroll-wheel is a big let down, everything else is more or less perfect. I hope Kensington do revise this product in future though and address the mechanical flaws.

AMENDED - I GOT THE RIGHT SOFTWARE, SET IT UP, REBOOTED AND IT STILL WORKS - OH FRABJOUS DAY... BUT YOU HAVE TO RUN IT MANUALLY AT STARTUP - ROYAL PITA! Generally I only use the lower buttons, uppers are set at double click & back, so used to control click / open from Mac Contextual Menu. MAYBE it's just me, but for an optical device it can stick after cleaning; polish the ball carefully afterwards. I LOVE Kensington products. BUT since the end of software on a disk, it's tricksy. I downloaded & installed the software for my all in one printer no problems, but this! I made one last try as I was getting sick of only 2 functional buttons. IT HELPS IF YOU HAVE ANOTHER POINTING DEVICE AS A BACKUP!!!!!!! I have a cheap wired trackpad, PITA to use but works. 1: goto KENSINGTON site. 2: find EXACT picture of device, select. 3: scroll down to downloads, you want KENSINGTONWORKS - NOT TrackballWorks - check INSTALLATION NOTES that it has the driver for the EXACT device. 4: download, launch from start menu. 5: play with the settings - there are TONS of them, keep fine tuning until it's right for you. 6: if you're still not happy you are a bigger PITA than me - well done you! I have rechecked EVERY setting I can find - Oh how I miss Apple Macs (but TOO expensive and poncy these days) - as far as I can tell, my system is STILL recognising it only as a "Kensington Expert Mouse". BUT the software works now so who cares if the PC calls my Trackball "Felicity Bumsquash". Trackball Works DID NOT detect my trackball, Kensingtonworks does; also does not crash the computer like TW. I know, i'm demanding. WHY Kensington do not just ship with the software on a USB stick is beyond me. Or even a DVD - it costs around £30 to buy a DVD-RW drive AND you can play CDs and DVDs AND burn CDs & DVDs! Showing my age I suppose. I remember my first home computer - Sinclair QL128 (Kb) with MICRO drives on a portable telly! Hours of fun waiting for programs to load; then crash ... repeat until the drive cartridges broke - happy days! Then Atari ST 520, 2, 4 with Disk drives and WINCHESTER drives as an expensive optional extra... PC, Macs, Android and back to PC. ANYTHING but Uni mainframe terminals! ALSO, I recommend >>>Kensington Mouse Mat with Wrist Support - Ergonomic Duo Gel mouse mat, compatible with laser and optical mice for comfort when at computer, laptop, office, PC, gaming - Red/Black (62402).<<< WITH an extra mouse mat wrist rest if you lean your elbows over the table, not freeishly hovering. Essentially you need around 4 inches of support to use this device, go by the supplied one as a guide - but it hurts (me anyway) to use it. Not that colour particularly, but it has plenty of space for the device and, for me sits above another mouse mat wrist rest so is MEGA comfortable. The one supplied just does not cut it. All in all I am satisfied NOW that I spent £80 for a trackball. I had a non optical one on Macs, wasn't around when I had my previous PC; now there's no mucking around with alcohol, Q Tips and tweezers trying to clean the rollers. Minivac and a screwriver if it got too bad. Just wipe the ball and innersocket. They are different, expensive, but so much easier and actually reduce wrist stress especially combined with an ergonomic keyboard. GREAT for arthritis / rheumatism / nerve damage (i'm dyspraxic, nature of the beast). Oh and finally I found the scroll wheel - it's a flipping dial - it's a ring surrounding the ball - PITA to avoid pressing a button! slight ridging so easy to find by touch and use. BUT you CAN adjust it in the Kensingtonworks settings too!!!!!!! Yes I do love playing around with settings, 50 something going on 5 with technology.

amazing device! this trackball is worth the investment if you work in pro audio, video or photography, I work in pro audio and it's the most efficient and easiest thing I've used yet, much better than a mouse. I have used it so far in lightroom, photoshop, inkscape, cubase, and wavelab all with noticably improved speed and workflow. The only problem with it is you'll never want to go back to a normal mouse again, having programmable buttons is very useful too, for example being able to program one button to double click saves a lot of time. The scroll wheel is also extremely useful when browsing websites, and zooming in and out in software, just hold ctrl or command and move it and you can instantly zoom in or out, having 4 buttons is just so much better too. The included armwrest is for me perfect, I tried to use it without and it did not feel right. The scroll wheel is nowhere near as loud as people are complaining about, don't worry, just buy one today!

This product has found its home in almost every professional recording studio in the world. It is extremely dextrous and such a comfort to the wrist. Long hours at the studio don't seem so long anymore! The only issue I have noticed is with the scroll wheel not performing smoothly, but it still works. The trackball is weighted and has sufficient momentum to sen e cursor flying to the other end of the wide screen display. Integrates very well with Pro Tools, and general workflow. I am yet to try out the customisable top keys to instantiate macros. Very satisfied with the product finish and quality.

After having read several reviews around the web and being aware of the potential downsides as well as the upsides, I decided to buy myself one of these. Boy, am I glad I did. Admittedly, I'm the kind of person who's not satisfied with the typical mousing solution (I have really big hands and I do a lot of delicate work) and likes to try new things, so if that's not you then you may want to try one out before you buy if possible, or at least get one with a return policy. Caveat emptor. That being said, short of building a custom one myself, the Kensington Expert Mouse is pretty much what I want in a trackball, and having used it for awhile any regular mouse feels foreign and less-than-intuitive. First, the cons, in order of greatest to least issue (and they're all minor issues to me anyway). :: It does have a bit of a backward slope to it, probably about 10-15 degrees, which my large hands and already-tilted desk find mildly awkward. If you have a desk that's fairly high above your lap, then that backward slant will probably match the angle your arms are already at and this won't be an issue. :: The scroll wheel, as has been mentioned elsewhere, does feel a little scratchy, like a plastic-on-plastic sort of texture. It's not quite the buttery-smooth, gliding motion you expect after using the ball itself (more on that later) - it feels more like the back of a plastic spoon sliding across a Formica counter. That said, mine wasn't that bad, and probably would go away with a bit of silicone oil, but other reviews range from "not a problem at all" to "nasty-feeling deal breaker" so I suspect that Kensington's quality control could use a bit of tightening up. Again, get one with a return policy in case you don't like it. Common sense. I find myself using the scroll wheel less than I would otherwise anyway, as I've mapped one of the buttons to middle-click and I use that in web browsers to scroll up and down by moving the cursor. Smoother and easier than the scroll wheel. :: Occasionally, a button click won't register if you press the button on the corner or edge - you have to get closer to the middle. Rarely an issue unless I'm gaming, because my hands have a large span and I may physically miss the button at a critical moment when I'm not paying attention. It'll come with practice, I'm sure, just something to be aware of if you have palm-a-basketball-sized hands like me. Now, to the pros! Whee! :: Yes, it's got a pretty big footprint - it's about 5.5" by 9" with the included stiff-foam wrist rest (which I do recommend using, because of the aforementioned back angle) - but it doesn't move around. It takes up about 60% of the desk space that you'd dedicate to a typical mouse pad. Especially on those pull-out keyboard trays, there isn't enough room to use a mouse, but since the Kensington Expert trackball is under six inches wide it'll fit in a nice little rectangle next to the keyboard. Height is another matter, since the ball itself sticks out pretty high, but I don't personally find it to be too much of an issue. YMMV. :: The four large, programmable buttons. I'm not a lefty, but I mouse left-handed, so being able to map the buttons to essentially whatever I want with Kensington's free software is absolutely a blessing. In addition, different people will prefer to use different fingers for tasks of varying frequency, so whereas I don't right-click much and map it to where my ring finger sits, someone else may put it under their index finger or thumb. The software in general is pretty easy to use, and has enough functionality to feel nicely customizable without being so in-depth that only an advanced power user can take advantage of its potential. :: The trackball. Oh, that trackball. Smoother than a greased Fonzie on a Teflon-coated ice rink. Right out of the package it actually feels slightly rough or not as free-spinning, because the ball and its three contact points are completely pristine. Once you get some skin oils on it through use, it's like buttah. Gross-sounding, I know, but pretty much everything you touch gets skin oil on it. Speaking of which, the ball is just dropped into its socket, so to clean out the inevitable gunk that will accumulate in any trackball assembly you just have to turn it upside down and the ball falls out. No disassembly required. The inside of the socket is smooth plastic, so you just wipe it out and get back to work. The ball itself has a nice bit of weight to it, and is positively pleasurable to the hands in use. It's got a solid feel and has some inertia when you move it, which brings me to the next point... :: It has an infinite range of very smooth motion. I currently have a dual-monitor setup, and (besides being very awkward and un-ergonomic) I despise having to pick up a mouse, move it back to the other side of my mouse pad and continue my motion across the screen. DESPISSSSSE. It makes my fingers recoil just thinking about it... Ahem. Anyways. A quick flick of the ball will send the cursor moving across the screen, and the ball's inertia will continue the motion. It doesn't jump around or go crazy, it just follows the ball like it's supposed to. I have the acceleration parameter in the software set to maximum, so a fast motion of the ball will cover lots of ground quickly, but slow motions will still allow fine, precise positioning of the mouse. This becomes an even greater blessing with triple- or quad-monitor setups, and once again, this trackball takes up less desk space than an ordinary mouse. You don't have to have a huge screen to need this, either... for extra-fine work like Photoshop or video editing, you may want to slow the cursor speed down, which effectively makes the screen much larger relative to the motion of the mouse. There is no picking up and putting down with the Kensington Expert trackball - you just keep rolling. If you're not there yet... keep rolling. It feels natural, the way navigating a computer should. So, to sum it all up, I guess I could say that I love my Kensington Expert Mouse because it feels right. It's intuitive to use, customizable, ergonomic, and it just works. There are a couple little niggles, but in my humble opinion they are far outweighed by how they make my computing experience easier and more natural. Because everyone has different needs for their computing experience, not everyone will want or need one of these. If I was just an occasional casual computer user that isn't concerned with ergonomics or ease of use, I would absolutely think twice about spending $75 on a mouse I'm not sure I'll like when the one I have mostly does what I need it to. But that's probably not Kensington's primary market here. For me, and people like me, it's worth the money to make my interface with my computer feel good, because I use it every day.

Muito gostoso de mexer. Botões muito fáceis de clicar ao manuseiar a bola. Minha única ressalva é que o botão raspa na bola quando você segura o botão e roda, mas aí é um uso errado meu... mas com 1mm a mais de distância do botão resolvia.

Top class, fine control and has a serious pphysical presence but also a serious function. IF you like trackballs, this is IT!

Trackball nie współpracuje z oprogramowaniem Kensington. Sprawdzałem na 2 komputerach z Windows 10 64bit. Wsparcie producenta praktycznie nie istnieje - na odpowiedź czeka się ponad 2 dni, a uzyskane porady do niczego nie są przydatne. Szkoda, bo sam produkt całkiem fajny.