I do not see an encoder wheel... is its motion directly read from a laser ?
No. There is an encoder wheel situated below the frame.
Enhanced resolution? How does this work exactly? Can the resolution be reduced as well? As some games you might work better with less resolution.
I don't think that's what I wrote. But resolution can always be very effectively reduced via software sensitivity. However,
resolution cannot be increased in software.
Think of it in terms of a digital image. You can take a 5 megapixel digital photo and reduce it to a 1 megapixel image and it still looks great, just smaller. That's because there was more than enough data for the algorithm to choose from to retain the image quality. It just threw away what it didn't need.
Now take the 1 megapixel image and blow it back up to the original 5 megapixel size. Looks like crap, right? That's because there isn't enough real data to create an image that large, so much of it is duplicated.
Too much real data is a far, far better situation to be in than too little.
RandyT