NDA Art Critique Message Boards

I get asked "What tablet should I get" quite frequently at conventions and through e-mails and other internet communication. I thought I'd take the time to write up a thread on my thoughts on the different tablets. Half of this post is tablet stats, half is opinion ;-)


What is the major advantage of a tablet over a mouse?
Drawing with a tablet is more like drawing with a pen on paper then the mouse will ever be. The major advantage of the tablet over a mouse is the pressure sensitivity. This is particularly evident in inking, tactile brush strokes, and airbrushed shading. The tablet senses when you're pressing lightly, firmly, and anywhere in between. You can use this feature in many compatible art programs (ie: Photoshop, Painter, PSP, Paint Tool SAI, Opencanvas, and more) and have it affect your paintbrush and tools in different ways.

Personally, when I ink I use the pressure to taper the width of my lines. When I press lightly, I get a nice thin line. When I press more firmly, my line gets thicker. The combination of subtle tapering and thick and thin lines without having to contantly change brush sizes or make adjustments in the tool options is awesome! You can also use the pressure to adjust the size of your textured paintbrushes, allowing you to taper the strokes and have the digital brush behave a bit more like real paint. Finally, you can set the brushes and tools to adjust how opaque they are based on pen pressure. This is particularly useful for shading and rendering. You do not need to be constantly changing out to lighter and darker shades paints or higher and lower opacity.

There are several other handy features of drawing tablets, but they are often model dependant. Pressure sensitivity is the big thing!



Bamboo:
[list=]The Bamboo Pen has 512 levels of pressure sensitivity. It's a smaller tablet, and costs $69.
The Bamboo Crafthas 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity. It's a smaller tablet, comes bundled with some art software*, and retails for $129.[/list]

*Photoshop Elements and Painter Essentials. Elements has a different interface and is a very very watered down version of Photoshop. Painter Essentials is watered down painter and I believe it limits you to one layer, but you still get to play around with all the great brushes.

I recommend the bamboo line for anyone just starting in digital art, or those who do artwork as a hobby and work digitally less than 10 hours a month. The Bamboo is very cost effective, and a great way to get introduced do digital art without dropping hundreds of dollars and a piece of equipment you may or may not decide to continue to use, and that will be outdated in a few years anyway. You get the major benefit of owning a tablet, the pressure sensitivity. The small size, lower pressure of the Bamboo pen, and lack of keybindings make this more of a beginner or hobbiest's tablet, but it gets the job done admirably. The low cost means you can blow more of your budget on the pricey art software that you may have had your eye on as well!



Intuos:
[list=]The Intuos lineranges widely in price and size (the larger the tablet you buy, the higher the price), but they're 2048 levels of sensitivity. They have keys you can bind to functions.[/list]

If you know that you enjoy doing digital artwork and you plan on doing lots more in the future, the Intuos line is really slick, and if you have the cash to spare, I highly recommend it. You can enjoy working on a larger area and making broader pen strokes then the tiny bamboo. In addition, you have the fantastic ability to keybind the little buttons to the right or left of your tablet. This is particularly useful if you keybind functions such as "undo" or "brush size up or down", zoom in and out, or your alt/ctrl/and command keys (it's nice not to have to constantly reach for your keyboard!) This can be a huge time-saver!

I'm not quite sure how much of a difference the higher pressure sensitivity makes. Past a certain point I'm not sure that my hand has that noticible an amount of pressure difference it is capable of exerting! I know some artists swear that the higher sensitivity makes a difference in the curves of their artwork.



Cintiq:
[list=]The Cintiq lineis wacom's line of tablet with screens built into the tablet. There's a 12 and 21 inch version, which cost $1000 and $2000 respectively.[/list]

The obvious advantage of the cintiq is the screen. I know that artists will often complain that the hand eye coordination and not being able to see what they're doing directly can make using the bamboo and intuos a bit more challenging. (There is a learning curve with these, and it's very possible to get used to it!) Having owned both a screen and a non-screen wacom, I can say that having the screen under my pen is a real treat. Having the screen didn't really do anything to improve the quality of my artwork, but it did help cut down on the amount of time I spent drawing. With inking in particular, I'd make a lot less mistakes and use a lot less undos then I did when I didn't have a screen tablet.

The disadvantages of this type of tablet are fairly numerous.
They're ridiculously expensive.
They're not all that portable. You have a pretty huge hub and 4 cords you need to haul around, even with the "portable" 12 inch version. You need a power outlet, as the screen uses up too much power to be able to draw from your laptops USB alone.
The monitor of the tablet will die out long before the tablet itself does. I've had one for three years and it's covered with mura bruising and does not have as much color contrast as it did when I purchased it. Even on its brightest setting, the "white" of the screen is never really white.



Tablet PC/Laptops:
When I refer to tablet laptops and PC, I'm not talking about the ipad or other such devices that have come about in the past year. I'm referring to laptops that have been around for the past 6-7 years that have a monitor on them that spins around and is a touch screen, enabling you to draw right on it while still being a fully functional laptop.

The nice thing about these tablet pcs is that they may cost the same (or not much more than) a standard laptop. If you want to save yourself 1-2K on a Cintiq, and were looking at getting a laptop anyway, these might be a good choice. When you go tablet-laptop shopping, make sure that the laptop you're purchasing is powered by wacom technologies in its spec sheet. Many are not, and are only good for writing down notes on the screen, not making artwork.Another bonus to getting a tablet-laptop is that you can run off the battery power of your laptop and are truly portable. Cintiqs require a power outlet and you're carrying around a couple pounds in cords and hubs.





If you have any thoughts on drawing tablets, suggestions for other similar tools, or questions, feel free to add to this.

What kind of computer/laptop would I get if I bought a tablet? My computers (right now) are quite old and don't have a whole lot of memory, RAM, etc... Would you recommend a sturdy little (hopefully low-cost) laptop that I should buy with the tablet?

I'm not a computer guru by any means. If you have a techy friend, they'll likely be able to point you in the right direction for good laptop specs and value.

Here are the minimum system requirements needed to run Photoshop if that is at all helpful. Almost all laptops (and some netbooks) have the minimum system requirements to run photoshop, though I recommend you NOT get a netbook.

As far as running art programs, the more ram you have, the better! The 4 year old lappy I work on has 2 gig DDR2 ram, and my desktop has 6gig DDR3. When I work with smaller (under 3000 pixels) files that have less than 20 layers, there is really no noticible difference between the two after the file has been opened and photoshop loaded. (the work time). But as soon as I move up to higher resolutions or complex multi-layered folder systems of 50+ layers, the extra memory makes a HUGE difference in performance.

Again, if you have a techy computer friend, they'd probably be tickled to death to talk your ear off about computer specs.

lol I've been talking to my brother-in-law and sister about the computers and equipment and such. But thank you so much, Neon!!

This is very helpful, thanks!

Um, is the monitor lifespan of the Tablet Laptop better than a Cintiq? I was considering getting a Cintiq in a few years when I graduate, but since I don't have a laptop I'm thinking that might be a more worthwhile investment.

For now though I might just look into an Intuos!

Difficult to say. My friend Ed has had a tablet-laptop for 5 years now and the monitor still looks great. I got a Cintiq 3 years ago and the monitor is all covered in Mura bruising and it has dead pixels. Alex got a Cintiq at the same time as I did, and he has no dead pixels or bruising. I don't think I have enough experience with both to give you a definite "This one dies quickly" on either one.

As a quick update, I guess "tablet laptops" are called "Tablet PC" and that may be a better search for you. Newegg has several. Just make sure the tablet pc you're looking at is a complete laptop with a keyboard and a windows operating system and NOT an i-pad ripoff. The monitor top is often connected to the keyboard and base in the center, by this slick little rotatey-swivel deal, allowing you to spin your monitor completely around and snap it down flat.

Again, with any tablet PC you look at, make sure it's powered by wacom technologies for its touchscreen, or it likely won't have the sensitivity you need to do artwork. While the tech specs don't always say if it is or not, a quick google search for your brand + wacom can usually yield a result.

There's a mac version of a tablet-laptop called the "Modbook" out there too if you don't like PC, but it's expensive as all heck and uses an older model of macbook as its base component.

Some thoughts from a Wacom Bamboo owner:

If you're going to get a Bamboo tablet, make absolutely sure that the drivers are installed properly. Otherwise, your strokes will appear jittery and pixellated, especially if you're using GIMP. It's not only pressure sensitivity, but I find that subpixel stroking is also a huge advantage.

Also, make sure that you're comfortable drawing at alternate angles (like Neon said, the hand-eye coordination). For somebody like me who has almost no experience in this area, drawing the stroke while holding the pen vertically can be quite a challenge - much more of a challenge than just drawing it out with good ol' pencil and paper. And drawing the stroke while holding the pen non-vertically is a recipe for disaster, because I'll always miss the angle I actually want. Because an upcoming project of mine is going to involve quite a lot of digital art and I'm currently in the process of practising my drawing for such a thing, I might be in the market for a tablet PC or a 12-inch Cintiq myself. But that'll come much later, when I actually have the money to buy that stuff

@ the whole Tablet PC thing: Usually, those tablets will just be called "Tablets", and not "Tablet PC's". But yes, you want to be very careful with what you say to the sales rep, because there's almost no market for tablet PC's anymore, and if you seem like an everyday consumer, they'll direct you to the tablets.

I don't know if this will be a good tip or not, since everyone has a different drawing style and preference; but I use an HP EliteBook 2740p; and the drawing program I use is GIMP 2 (which has some better alternatives to Photoshop, but also some drawbacks), this seems to work quite well. One thing I do reccomend following if at all possible in the Digital Drawing tutorial at the end of NeonDragonArt Evolution: USE A SCANNER, DO NOT SUBSTITUTE UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECCESARY.
I made the mistake of assuming taking a picture of my sketch on my webcam and then screenshotting it would work just as well as a scanner, but OH was I wrong. Not only does it take more steps and almost twice the time, the image is much lower quality as well. (Which, a mental note: GET MOM TO GET A NEW SCANNER! Our current scanner is from when scanners were first invented, and it sort of bit the dust 3 years ago. XD)

I tested this hunch out in an American Best Buy store when I went there a week ago, and my hunch was 100% correct. The sales rep didn't even understand what I was asking when I said "Tablet PC's". He paused for a moment, and then said, "well, we have tablets."

Most higher-end desktops nowadays have at least 8 GB RAM. Some have 12, 16, and I've heard that the desktops by Dell support up to 24 GB of RAM. The one I just bought this past week (as a high-school graduation present from my aunt) only supports up to 16 GB, but I bought 8 for it. (Also, almost all RAM nowadays is DDR3.)

It also has a Radeon 6870 graphics card, in case that's ever useful for Photoshopping or other sorts of gaming >_<

There, how's that for talking your ear off?

[I know this could be considered necrobumping, but the topic was still on the front page, so why not.]

I want some information on how sunken in below the surface the screen of a Cintiq is. I know that on some tablet PCs, it can be a few millimetres off, which is really annoying when I'm trying to place the pen down to draw a line and the parallax screws me up.