Ostriig on 6/3/2011 at 02:34
Hey, thanks for the input! It was delivered yesterday while I was at work, though, got an express shipment and I picked it up this morning from the depot, ended up opening and installing it before reading your post.
But, thing is, I'm not really sure I'd return it at this point. I ended up spending the better part of 9 hours dicking around with it today, I do like it. Quite a lot in fact. I don't seem to be having trouble with the small active surface, actually, I'm rolling along quite fine with it. The touch input makes a big difference in this regard too, I'd say, as there's a lot of scrolling and zooming involved. It really is some great functionality to have built into this sort of device.
You were correct about the touch being shoddy, though. It gets quite moody and sometimes doesn't pick up various gestures or mixes them up, like zoom with scroll or two fingers tap with scroll. It's definitely not like a proper multitouch laptop trackpad. It also seems to have some trouble with interfacing with Photoshop's windows, some times it just locks out of the scrolling capabilities and you need to adjust the side sliders to jump start it out of that bug.
All in all it does make a good addition when it works, which is most of the time. And I seem to be adapting quite well to the working with it, a good deal quicker than I'd imagined. Granted, I've got nothing to compare with, but I'm definitely happy with the purchase so far.
You mentioned tilt - how exactly does that work, does it make a huge difference in functionality? I'm probably gonna stick with the Bamboo for now, but if I develop well with it there's stuff like that I could keep in mind for a future purchase. I did have a look around for second-hand Intuos tablets on eBay, but I didn't find anything on Buy It Now within my price range. And as for makes, I only looked on Amazon but they all used battery powered pens.
Muzman on 6/3/2011 at 03:13
This all happens too quick for me these days.
I've got an old Intuos which I don't use nearly enough these days, but I remember these buying considerations from the old days.
Basically if you're used to using a brush or charcoal or something in a studio on A1 paper with vast arm movements and you want to go digital, you're going to have to adapt. Recreating that feel in the computer is going to require the biggest, highest res and most responsive graphics tablet and software you can get. Which means top dollar.
Even if A4 with pen and pencil is your usual you can expect something of a come down. It's quite possible to work a bit slower and smaller with a little practice and some mastery of the hotkeys though. And once you do that these things are great. Indispensable if you do it a lot.
Consider it adding another string to your bow.
Tilt's also cool for adding a bit of subtlety to things. Working in phototshop a lot you can intially find getting back the 'organic' requires a bit of extra work. Tilt gives you back another dimension of expression to the stroke. It's not much if you're used to artline fine points or whatever. Painters and calligraphers would love it.
Ostriig on 6/3/2011 at 03:27
So it can be used to vary opacity and size in the same way that pressure does? Or are there other characteristics of the brush that it typically influences?
Also, one big thing I forgot to ask, this sort of device doesn't use any magnetic systems, does it? 'Cause right now I have it parked literally right in front of a 40W speaker. Nothing major, but I wouldn't want to put it at risk if there is any.
Muzman on 6/3/2011 at 03:43
I doubt it. 40w isn't very much anyway. The field around it wouldn't extend significantly outside the case, I'd think. You'd probably need a large transformer or degaussing wand or something to really notice anything funny going on.
Anyway, typically tilt is set to width of the stroke and so on, as per tilting a marker or something, but on photoshop these days you can assign it to damn near anything like most other parameters; from rotating the brush texture to adjusting colour brightness, saturation, bleed etc. You can set all these things up do do crazy psychedelic things no real tool is likely to be able to do (and usually make things look like puke the first few tries)
Ostriig on 6/3/2011 at 16:28
Alright, thanks for the clarification! Could definitely see the use for tilt, but while I'm learning I can probably do without it. And yeah, looks like some of the stuff you can set in the Brush controls windows is just mental. :P
inselaffe on 8/3/2011 at 17:25
Seems like muzman has pretty much covered what i was on about, and explained tilt.
I was just trying to change the aspect ratio of my tablet, since my monitor is 5:4 and my tablet 4:3, however i found that when you change the active area, all it seems to do is change the area of the tablet/screen that is active, rather than correcting the proportions, as you would think :(
So all in all i am a bit fed up about that, but have found later drivers so will try them.
In terms of tablets without batteries and with tilt that are reasonably cheap:
(
http://www.waltop.com.tw/prodDetail.asp?id=29)
(
http://www.waltop.com.tw/prodDetail.asp?id=38)
Waltop seems to sell tablets to other companies (like aiptek (and perhaps trust?)) to resell on.
For example here is the aiptek version of the venus tablet (the picture on the waltop site is different for some reason - but on waltop news on other sites, it's picture like the aiptek):
(
http://www.aiptek.eu/index.php?option=com_product&task=view&productid=234&Itemid=585)
And wow, you can get it for £120
Considering the intuos is £160 and that's for the rediculously tiny A6 version (A5 is £300 :O :O) then i would say that's a bloody good deal. Sure you won't get a felt brush and certain things but to be honest i'm not that fussed - better than being raped by wacom. As long as you can change the aspect ratio in the drivers then it's all good! Have to look up on that.
Might be worth waiting to see when aldi next do tablets again to see how even cheaper it might be rebadged there.
The problem with companies selling stuff to people for rebadging is it makes it very confusing and hard to shop around for.
Edit - by the way, looking at what you posted before, the trust wide tablet, aiptek media tablet and genius g-pen ones are all THE SAME TABLET! haha. See what i mean about waltop basically selling the same tablets for everyone to resell.
inselaffe on 8/3/2011 at 19:28
Update regarding (
http://apple-gadgets.de/testberichte/medion-grafiktablett) my own tablet (for anyone who has it that somehow searches here):
New drivers from waltop appear to do the mapping correctly, i now have a proper aspect ratio! hooray!
They're the media and slim series ones from here: (
http://www.waltop.com.tw/download.asp)
In fact in the article i linked to above, it has drivers that look like the ones i downloaded - which are rather different (read, a lot better) than the ones i was previously using. I guess they released them on mac a long time ago.
