Princeton PTB-S1 Sirius graphics tablet hits Japan

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.).