The new Wacom Cintiq 21UX graphics tablet

Few things on this earth inspire more desire and envy for graphic artists than Wacom’s Cintiq graphics LCD screen tablets. Now Wacom has updated their popular 21-inch model to the massive Cintiq 21UX which features 2048 levels of pressure, a new grip pen and a couple of other snazzy features.

The beauty of the Cintiq models is that they incorporate onscreen display to the graphic tablet surface. Being able to look at the source as you draw on it, not on a pad below it, greatly increases accuracy and ease of use for the artist. In the past, the Cintiq 12WX (a review can be found here) and Cintiq 21WX had 1,024 levels of pressure and limited bezel buttons. The new 21UX kicks those features into overdrive and doubles the pressure sensitivity, includes 8 buttons and a thumb wheel on each side of the frame and back trackpads for easy manipulation when holding the tablet. They’ve also updated the popular Wacom Grip Pen to include new tip sensor tech resulting in the slightest touch registering in a screen action.

The price still remains the same at $1,999 which is higher than most of us can afford. Still, it fills a spot on all of our wish lists and remains the subject of desire mentioned in all our emails to rich relatives. Now wipe the drool off your chin and get back to work on that freelance project.

Source: Gizmodo

Wacom introduces new HD interactive pen displays

It looks like our Wacom graphics tablet is all growd up. Sure, it was in that hip, arty phase for a while, but finally decided it had to move out of the parent’s house and get a real job. Now we have the DTU-1631 and DTU-2231 which focuses on providing large format, high definition displays aimed at industry professionals (like emergency responders, radiology technicians, engineers, planners and other smart people).

The DTU-1631 has a 15.6-inch screen with a 1366 x 768 resolution and sells for $1,249. The DTU-2231 has a larger 21.5-inch screen and a 1920 x 1080 resolution which sells for $1,899. Both models feature 512 levels of sensitivity, 2 USBs, DVI-I input/output, adjustable stand, 16:9 aspect ration and battery-free pen.

These pen tablets add to Wacom’s already existing line of special industry displays like the DTZ-2100, DTU-1931, DTF-720 and DTF-521. These new 720 and 1080 HD capable screens are sure to make some professional’s jobs much easier.

Source: Akihabara News and Slashgear

Review of the Genius G-Pen M712X graphics tablet

We’ve seen quite a few Genius tablets floating around for a while now and we’ve always wondered how they compared to the giant Wacom-sized elephant in the room. Thankfully Genius has allowed us to answer that question as they were kind enough to send us their G-Pen M712X for review. After spending quite a bit of time using it in all manner of ways we have to wonder why this current batch of Genius tablets isn’t getting more notoriety.

Genius has been building graphics tablets for a few years now. They aim to provide affordable tablets in larger sizes to beginning digital artists and hobbyists. Even their website, www.GeniusTablet.com, focuses on tutorials on how to use graphics tablets better and artwork made by Genius tablet users. Their new G-Pen Power series (M609 and M712) provides a large size tablet (an active area of 12 x 7.25 inches in the M712x’s case) for a very affordable price. Each G-Pen Power series model has an “x” model which means it has “dual mode” that switches between widescreen 16:9 format and fullscreen 4:3.

Genius G-Pen M712X Specs

The M712X has a 12 x 7.25 inch active area in wide and 9.5 x 7.25 inch active area in standard mode. If features 4,000 LPI, has 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity, a 200 point per second refresh rate and an accuracy of +/- 0.3mm. On the tablet you’ll find two rolling pads for scrolling, zooming, volume control, brush size and selecting with center click. There’s also a series of menu buttons that toggle what the rolling pads control and the dual mode selector (which switches between 16:9 and 4:3 active area). Surrounding the active area is a whopping 34 hot keys that you can link to any manner of program and OS shortcuts.

The Unboxing

To start, the Genius G-Pen M712X comes in a very large and well-built box. The outside is chalk full of information. The back specifically has spec information in 25 languages and a nice details of the tablet and cordless pen.

All in all it does a good job describing the abilities of the M712X in both text and visual icons.

When you open the box you’ll find the tablet taking up nearly the entire space of the box. The tablet is wrapped in a packing sheet and anchored with two styrofoam pieces holding it in place.

After lifting out the tablet you’ll find the manual, installation and program CDs in a clear plastic ziplock bag and the cordless pen, battery, extra pen nibs and nib remover in a plastic molded case.

Here’s the entire contents of the box. You have the wrapped M712X tablet, pen holder, cordless pen, nibs, nib remover, battery, nib removal instructions and manual bag with paper manual and CDs.

Contents of the pen case.

Four CD’s come with the G-Pen M712X. You have installation CDs for both Windows and Mac OS, Photoshop Elements 6.0 and Ulead PhotoImpact 12 SE.

The G-Pen M712X is very well built and sturdy. It’s built with glossy black plastic around the drawing surface. The active area surface itself has a clear vellum cover that can be lifted and used to secure papers placed under it for tracing.

The Review

We got off to a bad start with the G-Pen M712X. The included software drivers weren’t up-to-date with our Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Windows 7 test computers. While not a big deal — we simply went to the Genius site and downloaded the most recent drivers — one usually expects to have everything you need to start using your tablet included in the box. The driver itself is rather simple and easy to setup any of its 34 shortcut keys.

There was one more thing that irked us. Once you load the driver on a Mac it continually stays there. It’s possible there may be a way to remove it from your active programs list, but we haven’t found it. Day and night, tablet plugged in or not, the driver is still there, waiting in the shadows of the other applications, waiting to annoy you when you close programs or go to shut down your computer. Sure it doesn’t hurt anything, but aesthetically it’s a source of frustration.

The pen tablet, however, is another story. It’s quick, responsive and very easy to use. It’s constructed of sturdy, black glossy plastic and lays perfectly flat with no flexing or movement when working. We were quite impressed with the build quality actually. The large size allows you to really focus on an area of work. The wheel and selector is much more useful than we had anticipated and being able to set it for zoom, scroll or brush size saves a lot of time when working on a project. The wheel clicks slightly when you rotate it. Some have remarked that this makes it feel cheap, but we found it a nice supportive measure when using the wheel. The other selectors along the top of the tablet include volume control and widescreen/fullscreen selector.

Surrounding the active area of the pad, which comes within 2-3 inches of the edge, are the 34 shortcut keys. While we don’t use shortcut keys that often it’s easy to see this as immensely useful for those that are. You can easily set up the keys with the driver in a series of simple dropdown menus. It supports both hot key setup (by allowing you to check option/shift/command and select the keyboard key with it) or links (which you can use to link to programs and applications).

The surface of the active area is protected with a translucent sheet of plastic that can be lifted up at the bottom to expose the traditional graphic tablet surface. At first it seems rather odd to include, but after using it for a while we’ve grown quite fond of it. First, it keeps dust, grease and hand oils off the tablet’s surface and is easy to wipe off or clean. Second, it’s quite useful for tracing images into a graphic program. We used it quite a few times to trace a sketch from sketchpads and then work on it in Illustrator or Photoshop. There was no lack of sensitivity or inaccuracy of recording with a sheet of paper sandwiched between the active surface and the plastic sheet. Being able to trace the item without looking at the screen is quite useful as well. Trying to do the same thing with other graphics tablets failed and we finally had to tape the sheet down to keep it stable. Not a great situation. The plastic sheet also makes for a smooth writing surface. It’s firm and smooth as opposed to the slightly more rubber texture we’re accustomed to.

Many of the complaints stated about the Genius tablets revolve around the pen. The pen is certainly thicker than Wacom’s as it holds an AAA battery in it. The case is light plastic and cigar shaped and doesn’t have any eraser end, only a contact end with exposed nib. It also has a clear plastic rocker switch that isn’t all that ergonomic. Maybe it’s due to our large hands, but we didn’t have much of a problem with the pen. It certainly is of a lesser quality than pens that come with Wacom’s line of tablets and the weight and balance is a little off, but its size is typical of most larger pens and didn’t cause our hand to cramp after hours of use (which the Wacom pens sometimes do). The lack of eraser function is sorely missed however and if Genius put a little thought into redesigning their pens the hardware for the G-Pen series would be pretty great.

Conclusion

When all is said and done the Genius G-Pen M712X has two criticisms — its pen and software. For us, the pen wasn’t that much of an issue. Baring its cheaper feel it didn’t have any flaws per se, but we could see where people wouldn’t like it. The software should be an easy fix in the future. Genius needs to invest a bit in their driver interface and fix some of the program issues (especially those mentioned above).

These criticisms wane when compared to the actual performance of the tablet. Truth be told, we’ve become rather dependent on the M712X. It really is a great tablet. After using it for months now — mostly due to the nature of reviews we’ve read on Genius’s other tablets — we have never encountered a random glitch, dead area in the pad or any sort of hardware hickup. We’ve tried to reproduce many of the problems listed and haven’t succeeded after clocking over 80 hours with the tablet.

Whether or not this represents a turn in quality for Genius is something we can’t answer. All we do know is the G-Pen M712X far exceeded my expectations. We’d recommend it for the graphic artist who wants an affordable large scale tablet and can’t afford a Wacom Intuos4 Medium or Large graphics tablet.

Using Random.org we narrowed the contest entries first by randomly selecting the date (January 29th) and then using advanced Twitter search to find posts with the #BTRBamboo tag. We then counted up the entries for that day and generated another random number who pointed us to the winner…

Congratulations to @abitnerdy! You’ll be contacted shortly so we can mail you your new graphics tablet. For those that didn’t win, thanks for entering and stick around. We’ll be offering up another contest soon!

Look Ma, no wires!

The Wacom Intuos 4 graphics tablet is highly regarded to be the best non-screen pen tablet on the market. Now Wacom has upgraded their popular medium model to go wireless via a Bluetooth connection.

The new Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless graphics tablet takes all the great things about the medium Intuos 4 — like its 2,048 levels of pen pressure, OLED ExpressKey display that shows you what function each button will perform and the multi-function touch ring — and adds a wireless connection and snapping pen holder. It also has two lights on the side of the device; yellow or green to show you charge status and blue to show connection. The active area on the wireless is listed as 8 x 5 inches which is smaller than the Intuos 4 Medium tablet which is listed at 8.8 x 5.5 inches. The tablet charges by USB when plugged into your computer and is operational during this time. When not used for 30 minutes the tablet will go into a dormant mode to save battery. Wacom rates battery life at up to 18 hours but that doesn’t include constant use.

CNET released a quick review on the Intuos 4 Wireless last night and found it very responsive and great to use. The reviewer found no glitches or delays (something that we were concerned about when we heard of the move to wireless). They did uncover one major concern however — if you don’t pay attention to your power state there is the possibility that you’ll ruin your battery and have to have it replaced (a $39-$49 charge). This could happen if you leave the tablet on for a week or longer which will result in a battery drain that will make it unable to recharge. The CNET reviewer also had a few difficulties with Bluetooth pairing both with Snow Leopard and Windows Vista.

The Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless graphics tablet is available for preorder now for $399. Currently you can find the non-wireless model on Amazon for around $320 so having wireless will cost you about $80 more.

Source: CNET via Slashgear

Happy Tablet Eve from the Boogie Board

The Boogie Board Paperless LCD Writing Tablet was announced by Improv Electronics on Friday. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, the Boogie Board is a monochrome LCD screen that has resistive pressure sensitivity which allows you to write on the screen as if it were paper. When you’re done simply press the erase button and it clears the screen within a second or two. Think of it as an electronic Magna Doodle or dry erase board that costs a very reasonable $30.

We already know the Boogie Board is popular — it sold out in America within hours and worldwide in two days (Improv Electronics says they’ll have more in stock early next month). So far most internet criticism surrounds the lack of any recordable method. While that’s true with this version of the Boogie Board, we contacted Improv Electronics and they said they were working on a recordable version that uses a SD card to record and USB to transfer to a computer. They expect to have it for sale by the end of the year and estimate it will be around $50.

While this version of the Boogie Board is the size of a small notepad or the horizontal half of a letter sized sheet of paper, Improv Electronics is working on a larger legal pad size with recording capability. They are focused on bringing this product into the school system and have it replace traditional legal pad and five subject notebooks. To facilitate this, they are working to include clear templates that would help students practice their handwriting and number skills and even exploring a Boogie Board that would recognize handwriting and convert it to text.

Their goals are extremely admirable and, after playing with the Boogie Board for a while, we feel quite achievable. Now on to the review.

Packaging
The packaging for the Boogie Board is compact and simple. It has a fold out flab that allows you to see the entire board and test it yourself with your fingernail. There is a cut in showing the stainless steel telescoping stylus and plenty of information on potential uses printed on the sides. Upon opening you will find the Boogie Board resting on a cardboard insert along with a screen wiper cloth and instructions. Surprisingly there’s absolutely no plastic elements to any of the packaging which means its very easy to toss into the paper recycling bin once opened.

Build Quality
The Boogie Board is very compact and thin, especially the screen/writing surface which is only 1/8th of an inch thick. It’s surprisingly sturdy and despite being so thin, is mounted to a very rigid piece of plastic. You can bend it slightly when you try, but any thoughts of it being fragile or possibly snapped in half are forgotten as soon as you pick it up. The top part of the board (where its innards and erase button is found) is twice as thick, but again is made out of rigid plastic. It has a decent amount of weight — nothing heavy, but enough that makes it comfortable to your hand. Any lighter and there would be the worry of it possibly blowing away.

The included stylus has a simple but sturdy build as well. It certainly isn’t bendy or fragile like the Archos 9 stylus. It’s 4.5 inches in compact form and 6.5 inches when expanded. It’s easy to write with and comfortable to hold. The only small criticism is that it could have a finer point to allow for smaller writing. Still, the stylus point is smaller than, say, a Nintendo DS stylus.

Function
The pressure sensitivity of the Boogie Board is apparent as soon as you start using it. You can easily draw small chicken scratch lines by lightly brushing the surface. Conversely you can draw fine, wide lines with firm pressure. Coloring in solid parts of green is easy and there is no black parts if you go over it finely with a stylus.

Still, size is an issue. After performing a few handwriting tests we estimate that you can legibly fit 70-100 words on the screen. That might be enough space for a short meeting or to scribble a few notes on, but the lack of saving a screen means you won’t have much use for this in a business environment. We imagine if you had a finer stylus point you could increase the word count to 100-130 but that’s still rather limited.

Click for larger view

The only thing that really bothered us is that the screen picks up pressure from your knuckles. As you can see in the photo, you will have slight hand marks when drawing if you place your hand on the tablet as if you were writing naturally. With a bit of practice we were able to minimize the marks or even hover our hand above the board, but it was hardly natural. Skin contact doesn’t register unless there’s pressure placed behind it. This is also true when using the cloth to clean the screen — and you will be using it to clean the screen. It doesn’t register fingerprints, but it does show smudges after repeated use.

The erase button is simple and fast. The screen will flash a few times and clear itself in about a second. There is no removable battery or easy way to access the tablet’s internals, but considering the battery will last for 50,000 clears we can’t imagine ever needing to. Some complained about that, but the truth is even with heavy use you’re looking a years of function from this device. How many $30 products can that be said for?

What we’d like to see
There’s no doubt that lacking an ability to record what you write on screen limits the device. We’re looking forward to the next version that allows that. With it, the Boogie Board could morph from fun little device to office or school necessity. What would be even better would be a way to access previous screens and display them again on the tablet. For instance, if you wanted to access the previous page, simply flick up on the screen and the previous screen appears as you last modified it. We think that would make this a fantastic, must-have gadget.

You’re also continually conscious of the Boogie Board’s small size when writing. They are coming out with a legal pad size which would be just about perfect. Improv Electronics has received feedback from teachers that say the same thing.

Finally, we don’t know if it’s possible with the current technology, but we’d like to see the sensitivity increased so writing hand ghosting is eliminated.

Conclusion
The Boogie Board Paperless LCD Writing Tablet is a huge step in a very interesting direction. If you do any type of doodling or find yourself always reaching for the nearest pad to scribble down a quick idea then this is a very easy purchase. We even gave it to a three year old to test for a while and it kept her thoroughly entertained for a solid twenty minutes. For a parent, those 20 minutes would be worth the $30 all by itself. If you’re looking at the Boogie Board for a more official capacity, wait until the recordable version. Still, at such a low price point, it’s fun to just have around.

The Boogie Board Paperless Writing Tablet

The Boogie Board Paperless LCD Writing Tablet measures 8.8 x 5.6 inches and is only 1/8th of an inch thick and weighs 4.2 ounces. Essentially, it’s about the same size as a small notepad and affords you a writing area equal to about half a sheet of letter-sized paper. Doodle to your hearts content and when you’re finished simply press the erase button and start again. It’s rated to last for up to 50,000 erases. All this for a cost of under $30 makes this a tablet that you’re likely to buy if you often take notes or draw frequently.

The only downside we can think of is that there’s no recordable method to save your work. If Improv Electronics figures that out they’d have the perfect product. We’ve got one on the way and will be reviewing it next week so stay tuned. Update: See the exclusive hands-on review.

Update: After talking to an Improv Electronics representative, we’ve confirmed that they are indeed working on a recordable Boogie Board tablet that would utilize flash memory and a USB connection to save and download your work. It would be the size and model, just with added storage and USB connection. They anticipate having this new version available for sale within the year but will still sell the current base version. Price on this new recordable model would be around $50.

Source: CrunchGear

Win a brand new Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch graphics tablet

Aside from subscribing to our RSS feed, we promote our stories on Twitter and Facebook. We’re constantly on Twitter and use it as both a medium for discussion and news. So we figured for our first big giveaway we’d focus on our Twitter account – @tabletreview.

Entering for your chance to win is simple. Just follow our Twitter account – @tabletreview – and retweet this message:

Win a Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch graphics tablet from http://BestTabletReview.com – to enter just follow @tabletreview and RT this! #BTRbamboo

The more you RT the more chances you have to win, but we’ll only allow one RT a day — we’re not a fan of massive Twitter spam. At the end of the month we’ll be tallying all the RT messages and randomly picking a winner. It’s that easy to win one of the best graphic tablets on the market. Even if you’re not a graphic artist or video editor the Bamboo Pen & Touch is still a great prize (mostly because this one is still wrapped! Can you say regift?!).

Our hope is that you’ll find our website and our Twitter account to be a useful and prompt source for tablet news. Best of luck!

Wacom Bamboo Comic Pen and Touch graphics tablet

Wacom has also had success with packaging a quality tablet with a software bundle honed to a particular subset of graphic art. For instance, their Bamboo Craft is a differently painted version of the Pen & Touch with added photo manipulation software to aid the scrapbooking enthusiast. Now Wacom is releasing another graphics tablet — the Bamboo Comic Pen & Touch — for those who are into anime and manga art.

The Wacom Bamboo Comic is a Pen & Touch with a very detailed software package. It comes with Pixia Edition. Illust Studio Mini, Comic Studio Mini, Corel Painter Essentials 4 and Pencil LITE. All great programs to help the aspiring or accomplished comic artist. The only downside is that the new version is being released in Japan on December 2nd. We’re still waiting on word back to see if we’ll see a stateside release and, if so, for how much.

Source: Akihabara News

The Princeton PTB-S1 Graphics Tablet

Princeton features an entire line of PTB graphics tablets (ten if you want to count) but the S1 caught our eye due to the smooth look, multiple shortcut keys and it’s closeness to graphic artist workhorse tablet Intuos 4 by Wacom. To start with, the PTB-S1 features a large pen area of 10 x 6 inches. It has 1024 levels of sensitivity (the same as the Bamboo Pen & Touch), a +/- 45 degree pen angle, and a light pen with no battery to unbalance it.

The S1 is chalk full with shortcut keys, wheel interface and menu buttons — all to keep your hands off the keyboard and more on the tablet. It has 10 small pen selectable buttons above the art board area (kind of like F keys) and each side has a scroll wheel with five menu buttons below it to accommodate right or left handed artists without having to turn the tablet. There also another set of icon buttons at the top center of the tablet for things like zoom, move and drag. Although we haven’t gotten to test this tablet in person, it looks to be the most versatile graphics tablet we’ve seen so far when it comes to shortcut and macro keys.

That said all of those buttons makes for a large desk footprint of 15.35″ x 10.4″. That could take up too much desk space for some, but there’s no denying the PTB-S1 is one heck of a graphics tablet. It comes out the first part of December for 16,800 yen ($190 U.S.).