If your mind's a blank slate when it comes to choosing a drawing tablet, you need to know which features matter. Here's what to look for.
Jim Benson
IT'S ONE THING TO MAKE Mac-generated art look like the traditional art it mimics; it's quite another to make creating art on the Mac feel like sketching with a pen on paper. That's why more and more creative types are turning to a drawing, or graphics, tablet as a companion to a mouse and a keyboard.
There's never been a better time to buy a pressure-sensitive drawing tablet. Prices are dropping, and more than 50 pressure-aware painting and drawing applications now line retail shelves. It's not only artists who use tablets, either. As an input device, the stylus/tablet combo can be a welcome relief for wrists that have been hovering over a mouse or trackball all day.
Choosing a drawing tablet is quite different from picking a hard drive or some other electronic component that's less closely connected to your hands. Much depends on the feel of the stylus/tablet combination, and that's something no fact sheet can tell you. Test-drive as many tablets as you can. Dealers and trade shows are your best bets for hands-on testing, as is asking fellow professionals. But before you take that tablet on a spin around the block, here's what to look for.
Let's get a few things out of the way. These days, most tablets have the same basic functionality. All tablets have a resolution of at least 1,270 lpi and a pinpoint accuracy of .02 inch or better -- good for CAD artists but overkill for most graphic designers. Also, most offer 256 pressure levels -- much more sensitivity than any of us would notice.
But despite the apparent similarity, there are differences among individual tablets. So what features do matter? Here's our shortlist:
Size and Price
Narrow your options by first considering tablet size. Four of the five tablet manufacturers (see the "Drawing the Line" table) offer 4-x-5-inch tablets, which are ideal when space or weight is a factor (perhaps a nice addition to your PowerBook in that life-drawing class?). These tablets offer the speed and resolution of their beefier brethren, even though they come in a pint-sized package.
The most common tablets found in the studios of creative professionals are 6 x 8 or 6 x 9 inches in size. These midsize tablets are thin and light enough to fit in a file folder. Consider a 12-x-12-inch or larger tablet if you've got plenty of desktop real estate; a healthy budget; and a need for long, flowing arm movement. You can also buy very large digitizing mats -- such as CalComp's 30-x-36-inch and 36-x-48-inch EstiMats -- but these are better suited to architects or CAD artists.
The second most important factor is your budget. The price for a pressure-sensitive tablet and stylus ranges from $150 for a 4-x-5-inch model to $915 for a 12-x-18-inch one. Also, mail-order catalogs frequently bundle painting software and drawing tablets at bargain prices, so careful shopping can pay off.
Tracing Aids
All tablets -- with the exception of the Summagraphics and Wacom 4-x-5-inch units -- offer a plastic flap as a tracing aid: Slip a photo or sketch between the flap and the tablet's surface, and then use the stylus and your painting program's brushes to trace over the original. (Keep in mind that you won't be able to zoom in or out and still draw in the same place.) If you plan to trace a lot of images, check that the flap is made of thick plastic and that it's securely attached. Users who have heavy tracing needs should consider Wacom's 12-x-18-inch flapless electrostatic tablet, which "freezes" the paper to the tablet's surface.
Programmability
In order to make a tablet's surface a more efficient work space, most tablets feature a row of macro buttons across the top of the drawing area. You can use the drawing tablet's control-panel software to set typical keyboard or menu functions -- such as saving, copying, or even running a full-fledged macro (if you use CE Software's QuicKeys or another macro program) -- that you can control from the tablet instead of from the keyboard. Typically, the smaller the tablet, the fewer the number of macro buttons, but that's not always the case: Hitachi packs 15 macro buttons onto its 4-x-5-inch StudioPad.
Software
The software that controls each of the Macintosh drawing tablets is in the form of a control panel, but that's where the similarity ends. Look for software that lets you customize your stylus's pressure and that gives you options for mapping your tablet to your monitor. If you do a lot of tracing, for instance, you will want a proportional-mapping option, so all your traced images don't end up looking squashed or stretched. If you use multiple monitors or portrait monitors, good soft-ware should handle them with ease. Most important of all, the software should be clearly laid out and easy to understand and use (see figure 1).
Here's a quick test to see if the tablet's software is correctly interpreting the data the tablet sends to it: Open a painting program, and then use a straightedge and the stylus to draw a straight line on the tablet. If a wavy line appears on your screen, the software is not doing its job.
Connectivity
Most tablets for the Mac offer only ADB connections, which is fine, since the serial ports are usually occupied by modem and printer cabling. The ADB port handles data at a slower rate than the serial port, but it's still plenty fast enough (especially if you've got a fast Mac) to avoid a lag between the screen display and your hand movement.
Penmanship
Wacom is the only manufacturer that offers a batteryless stylus, and since it owns the patent for the technology, it's likely to remain the leader in this area. Users of the Wacom UltraPen enjoy a lightweight stylus (about the weight of a roller-ball pen) and don't need to worry about batteries failing during a late-night project. Many artists and designers, however, like the extra heft of a battery-loaded pen, and because most battery sets last a year or more, replacing them is really no big deal. Pens with batteries have more power too, letting you trace through a thicker stack of papers.
Tapping the stylus tip serves as a single mouse click, but the barrel of the stylus also contains either one or two programmable buttons. You can set the buttons to perform a double-click, save, or some other command or macro -- for instance, instead of double-tapping the pen to open a file, you could click a button on the barrel. Having more buttons isn't necessarily better, though -- most people rarely use one button, and two buttons can get confusing. By the time your thumb or finger finds the correct button, you could just as easily have used a keyboard or menu command.
Some pens have a rigid tip that doesn't give when you press, and although they're no less pressure-sensitive than those that have a tip that compresses a quarter inch or so, you may prefer a springy feeling. Also, the tips vary in the hardness of their plastic. Some show no wear at all, whereas others made of softer plastic wear down, just like a regular pencil. Harder is better -- the tips will need to be replaced less often. You won't find these tip tips in any promotional materials for tablets, so ask a knowledgeable salesperson or someone who's using the tablet you're interested in about that model's tip life.
Bells and Whistles
With all this feature parity, it's not surprising that tablet manufacturers are continually looking to one-up each other and discover the killer feature that gives them an edge over their competitors. Ask yourself if you actually need these seemingly sexy features. No matter how cool a tablet's feature is, if software companies don't support it, you won't be able to use it -- for instance, CalComp introduced a tilt feature several years ago, but only Fractal Design Painter supported it. So if you use a CalComp or -- more recently -- a Wacom stylus with Painter, you can create a brush that, for example, changes color as you flatten the stylus's angle to the pad. Nifty, but . . . . We don't know any digital creatives who live by a stylus's tilt feature.
Wacom recently introduced an erasable stylus too. It built a springy, hard plastic nub into the butt of its UltraPen; when you turn the pen over and bring it within range of the tablet, a program that's sensitive to the erase feature (the list of software includes all the major Macintosh painting programs) switches to its eraser tool. CalComp and Summagraphics have responded by adding an eraser button to the barrel of their pens. But whether you fumble trying to find the eraser button or turn the stylus over to erase, you're often better off selecting your painting program's eraser tool instead. With Painter, for example, if you've created a custom eraser variant, using the stylus's eraser button switches you to the program's default eraser, not to your custom variant.
Who knows what sorts of innovative fea-tures tablet manufacturers will produce next? Untethered tablets that communicate with the ADB port via infrared signals? How about a retrieve button on the tablet that, when pressed, causes the misplaced stylus to beep like a car alarm? Maybe a Magic Fingers(TM) vibrating pen to ease the pain of your recently developed case of writer's cramp? (Just kidding on this last one, tablet engineers. Really.)
The bottom line? Look for a digital stylus and a tablet that feel as comfortable to use as their analog counterparts, pen and paper.
Jim Benson is an author, graphic designer, and artist living in San Diego, California.
Drawing the Line / Pressure-sensitive Drawing Tablets
Size of Active Area Model List Price
4 x 5 inches CalComp DrawingSlate II 32050 $150
Hitachi StudioPad 405J $199
Summagraphics SummaPad $189
Wacom ArtPad II 4x5 $175
6 x 8 inches Kurta XGT 6x8 $395
(ADB, $425)
Summagraphics Summa Expression $389
Wacom ArtZ II 6x8 $390
6 x 9 inches CalComp DrawingSlate II 31090 $280
Hitachi MultiPad 609J $299
12 x 12 inches CalComp DrawingSlate II 31120 $390
Kurta XGT 12x12 $575
Summagraphics Summa Expert 12x12 $499
Wacom ArtZ II 12x12 $540
12 x 18 inches CalComp DrawingSlate II 31180 $535
Kurta XGT 12x18 $915
Summagraphics Summa Expert 12x18 $899
Wacom ArtZ II 12x18 $870
(electrostatic, $1,089)
Get Info
CalComp 602-948-6540
Hitachi Digital Graphics 408-747-0777
Mutoh America (Kurta) 602-276-5533
Summagraphics 512-835-0900
Wacom Technology 360-750-8882
Figure 1 - Wacom's control panel is a good example of
software that makes configuring your tablet a breeze.
Choosing one of the colorful icons reveals
easy-to-follow instructions, and the Help button
displays a graphic-rich online guide to help smooth
any rough spots.
Wacom ArtPad II 4x5, ArtZ II 6x8, and ArtZ II 12x12
