Kit opto encoder resolution?

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

The decoding type can be used on any quadrature encoder. If you want to count the rising and falling edges on both the A and B channel, choose 4x. 2x does rising and falling edges on only one channel, while 1x only counts 1 edge on one channel. If you are using the encoder for position only, using 4x gets you extra resolution. If you are trying to use the rate function, you'll probably have better results with 1x. Choose whatever makes sense for your application.

Forgive me if this has been asked and answered elsewhere; if so I haven't found it yet:

Per the above explanation, if 1x is reading only one channel, it wouldn't know which way the encoder is spinning, right? So the rate information with 1x wouldn't tell you whether the rate is positive or negative, right?

So if you wanted a rate that contained direction information, would you have to use the 4x?