Razer Firefly – Chroma Enabled Mousepad
Most of the time you don’t need a mouse pad if you have a gaming desk or some smooth surface to place your mouse. And even if you need one you can get the cheaper mouse pads from the market. But what about a mouse pad with RGB lighting in it, Surely it will look cool but you’ve to spend more on it for just the lighting plus you also have to power it up so there will an extra cable on your desk. In the end, you’ve to do the cable management for the cool piece of equipment.
Gaming mouse surfaces do affect mouse performance, though. Razer offers some gaming mouse mats for different budgets and needs. One of their two top mats is the Razer Firefly Hard Gaming Mouse Mat. The Firefly boasts Chroma lighting, a generous 14 x 10-inch size, and a hard surface made especially for gaming – all for sixty bucks. if you live in Pakistan it will cost around 7500/- PKR.
Here is the full review of Razer Firefly Hard Gaming Mouse Mat.
Size is important
The Razer Firefly measures 14 x 10 inches, placing it in the “Medium” category of mouse surface sizes. If there is less room on your desk you can use it in a vertical orientation. The Firefly is made of hard plastic though it does have a minor “give” if you bend it. So you can’t simply fold it and take to LAN parties, unlike cloth mouse pads. The top features a micro-textured surface engineered to provide a balance between speed and control play styles. The bottom of the Firefly is coated entirely in textured rubber.
Feel
I personally like the cloth mouse pads. I was using a cloth mouse pad with Logitech G302 before I got this with Razer Deathadder elite. The Firefly’s hard surface feels surprisingly different to use than a soft pad. This one is engineered partially for speed, and it does have a significant impact on the speed of mouse movement.
The actual micro-textured surface provides a couple of benefits. The microscopic crystalline specks used to create the surface actually increase reflectivity to mouse sensors. This boosts the precision of the mouse, making impressively precise movement possible.
Another welcome advantage of the Firefly: it’s super easy to wipe clean. There is no problem even if you clean with a slightly wet cloth.
Lighting
The Razer Firefly features Razer’s Chroma lighting with 16.8 million color spectrum lighting technology. The mat features lighting along its left, right, and front edges, as well as a light-up Razer logo on its top-right corner. The back edge is without the lighting and also have a hump in the middle where USB cable is connected. A six-foot braided USB cord extends from a raised area at the back of the mat. When plugged in, the Firefly lights up (lighting can also be disabled in software). When not plugged in, you obviously get no lighting.
Razer Synapse
To customize the Firefly’s lighting, you’ll have to use the downloadable Razer Synapse software. This requires the creation of an online account with Razer (a minor hassle), after which any lighting changes made will be saved to the user’s account on the cloud. Synapse is really easy to use, particularly for the Firefly due to the relative simplicity of a mouse mat. No wading through multiple tabs to set up your colors here.
The Firefly offers five lighting effects (plus the option of no lighting), each with varying degrees of customization such as brightness and speed. A brief overview:
- Breathing: All of the mat’s lights pulse up and down in intensity. You can’t have one light pulse a different color than the others, but you can set the lights to alternate between two different colors.
- Reactive: This feature requires that you use at least one other Razer Chroma-supported device (a mouse or keyboard) in tandem with the Firefly. When enabled, any keypress or mouse click from the compatible device will cause the Firefly lights to flare up. If you want your mouse mat to flash when you fire in a game or whatever, the Reactive effect will make it happen.
- Spectrum Cycling: The mat cycles between various colors.
- Static: The Firefly stays lit up with a single color of the user’s choosing.
- Wave: A series of colors flow around the edges of the mat.
Demerits of Razer Chroma
- Mousepads don’t normally have a USB cable coming out of it but this one has lighting effects so it must require power.
- You’ve to manage another cable accessory on your desk.
- Sometimes the wires of mouse and mousepad are entangled and cause trouble while gaming if there is no proper cable management.
- Unlike normal mousepad, you can’t fold Razer firefly due to its plastic nature.
- That bump at the back looks ugly and it shouldn’t be there. I sometimes collide my Deathadder elite with it when I’m so emersed in gaming.
Conclusion
There is no doubt Razer Firefly looks cool on the desk and it also offers some great features apart from a normal mouse pad. You can have it light up in any color, thanks to chroma lighting. Razer synapse works fine and helps you sync your gaming setup to one color. That fancy lighting might be for showing off, but the Firefly has practical purposes too. It’s roomy, has a surface that legitimately enhanced speed, precision, and feel, and it’s also easy to clean. There are some other things you can do if you are tight on budget, Get a cheaper mousepad and get an even better Gaming mouse. Lights don’t help in speeding up the mouse or response time. They are just for show off your build online in forums. There are a lot of pc upgrades that you can go for instead of spending 60$ on a mousepad.
Razer firefly is now available on Amazon for only 45$.
