Clip Studio Paint, the iPad Pro, Art Studio House Arrest, and You

Celsys recently released a feature complete, no concessions made, portable version of its desktop illustration software, Clip Studio Paint, for iOS and the iPad Pro.

I’ve used some form of Celsys’ art software since about 2004 back when it was called Comic Studio in Japan. It’s successor, Clip Studio, has been my go-to application for illustration since I beta tested the English localization for Smith Micro.

Suffice to say, the release of my preferred art tool on the iPad Pro intrigued me. An hour after hearing the news I rushed out and purchased a new 12.9” iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. My hype was high. My expectations, however, were low.

When last I’d checked in with the iPad Pro, it was a nascent device with little apps more than Procreate to justify its expense. I was in a long term relationship with my Cintiq Companion, the precursor to the MobileStudio Pro, and a Surface Pro, and the slate of apps available on the iPad Pro seemed more suitable for sketching and ideation than finished works.

Some folks swore by Procreate, but the floaty, distant feel of making marks and the shallow, odd brush engine left me wanting. Was the Pencil’s feel a result of the hardware’s low fidelity or was it representative of the early, rough handful of art apps? I couldn’t tell you. I returned the Pro. Clip Studio on the Cintiq Companion offered me desktop-grade art software with no compromises. Sort of.

The compromises asked by the Companion were those of true portability. Much like it’s current kin, the MobileStudio Pro, it felt like a device that wanted to be plugged in to a power source, set on a desk, and worked at in a tethered, stationary way.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my Companion. Well, loved my Companion. I used it for three or four years — daily — from launch until now. But, as dependable and capable as it was, it was never as portable as I’d hoped.

The other devices I live with are even more studio and desk bound. My main workstation boasts a Cintiq 27QHD. The 27QHD is roughly the size of a late eighties Buick with the price tag to match. No normal monitor arm dare try to hoist its heft, so it sits on an imposing metal limb that looks like an assembly line robot in an automotive plant.

The reason I bring this up, and there’s a reason I promise, is that digital artists haven’t had many tools where portability and capability overlap near-perfectly in a Venn diagram.

Is the iPad Pro, when paired with desktop grade art software, that unicorn? How much overlap exists in its Venn diagram? Will I ever be able to leave this damn studio?

Okay, okay. How well does it work?

I was down on the iPad Pro when I tested it years ago, but Clip on the Pro has changed my outlook on the Pencil’s competence and the iPad Pro’s viability single-handedly.

Imagine that Photoshop, Painter, and Sai were chopped apart and sewn into a Frankenstein-ian monster. That’s Clip.

Would that monster prove too beastly for the iPad’s hardware? I inked and painted at 11” x 17” and 600 dpi with brush sizes in the three and four hundred pixel range while the iPad Pro served up a video stream at the same time. For hours and hours. On a single battery charge.

The Pro had no fucks to give. Less than no fucks. Negative fucks. The monster could not be stopped. It’s choking a villager right now.

But every Rose has its thorn, right? Poison wouldn’t lie to me. Here are the thorns. Put on your gardening gloves.

First, the easy one. Dropbox and Google Drive integration and a less tedious way to import tools, materials, and templates, are the biggest items on my Clip Studio wishlist. Opening files and moving tools via the Share Sheet menu in Drive or Dropbox is slow and requires more steps than I’d like.

Now, the toughie. Clip requires a $8.99 per month subscription fee. At the time of writing, they’re offering a six month trial.

I want to pretend the iOS version of Clip hasn’t fast become essential to my workflow in less than two days. But it has. Being untethered from my studio adds more than nine dollars of value to my life. I don’t want to give that freedom of movement up.

I’m not a fan of subscription based software, but I spend more combined on a Twitch sub and Discord Nitro per month. I’ll cope even if I’m not crazy about it.

Everything’s a service now. You may not realize it, but you’ve been paying me $24.99 a month for my opinions for five years. Check your credit card statements.

Soon art apps will have loot boxes containing random filters and brush tools that can only be purchased with in-app currency.

I’m straying. You can take the gloves off now. The only negatives left to explain are things I got wrong when I tested an iPad Pro at its launch.

I’d maligned the Pencil in the past, but it wasn’t its fault it felt floaty and odd. What I thought were hardware limitations were apparently just the narrow ambitions of the art apps at the time. Those apps simply weren’t as good at complimenting the Pro as Clip is.

Clip has best in class stroke and pressure interpretation. If something feels off to you, adjust the global pressure curve in Clip Studio to get the most out of your Pencil. Doing so will help you experience the fullness of the Pencil’s pressure range and give the Pencil its proper due.

The Pen Pressure Setting is tucked under Clip’s logo menu (to the left of the File menu). Select it. Make a few strokes. The app will tailor its input curve to your hand’s heaviness and way of mark making.

Me? I set the curve to a straight, flat line. This allows the Pencil a full range of pressure un-massaged by the application. I adjust my brushes on an individual basis instead (with each having their own pressure curve tailored for a specific feel).

After telling the app to set a pressure curve that’s suited to you, you’re in the best position to feel the Pencil for what it is — a stylus with linear, predictable, and reliable output.

Where my Pencil touched the tablet my mark was made. There was no cursor offset to speak of. There was no stylus tip parallax that plagues Wacom’s Cintiq line. There was no laggy, laboring cursor trudging along behind my stylus to remind me those marks weren’t really coming from the end of the Pencil.

I hadn’t had this much fun drawing digitally — hell, in any capacity — in ages. I started to forget that I was using a digital device. I found myself treating the iPad Pro the way I do paper. I instinctively reached down to wipe away eraser leavings that weren’t there. I got lost in making art. I’m sorry I ever doubted you, Pencil.

So it works really well. What about that Venn diagram?

The iPad Pro paired with Clip Studio is a joy. I’ve written art hardware reviews for loads of digital tools. I have two Surfaces, a Companion, a heap of off-brand tablets and tablet monitors, and a few Intuos Pros and Cintiqs. If you forced me to keep only one, I might choose the iPad Pro and Pencil. It feels that good.

In the digital artist’s art-hardware-holy-grail-Venn-diagram of portability and capability mentioned earlier, the iPad Pro represents a near-perfect overlap.

My studio is empty as I write this. For over fifteen years, constrained in place by the tools required to do my work, I’ve occupied its spaces and brought the world to me through illustration. Now I’m bringing my illustration into the world instead.

In this article:
12.9‑inch iPad Pro (Latest Model)
Apple Pencil
Clip Studio Paint (iOS)
Clip Studio Paint (Desktop)

You can support my reviews by using my Amazon affiliate link or buying my digital art brushes for Clip Studio Paint.

Bosto 22U Mini Review

Not Small Where it Counts

Bosto describes the 22U Mini as a budget conscious Cintiq alternative, but the price and feature set place it closer to the growing mid-tier of Wacom alternatives.

Hardware

The 22U has a 5080 lpi, 2048 pressure-level digitizer and a wireless, rechargeable stylus. The screen is 1920x1080, IPS, and LED backlit with a 72% Adobe RGB color gamut. These features used to be rare in Wacom alternatives, but over the last few years have become more common. I consider these specifications the minimum for Cintiq alternatives and am glad to see the Bosto meeting them.

The 22U’s housing is clean, functional, and surprisingly light. There are no built-in hotkeys. The requisite video and USB connections are present and should accommodate most people’s PCs. The provided stand allows for the unit to sit nearly flat or perfectly vertical and is akin to those found in Yiynova, Huion, and Monoprice’s tablet monitors. A VESA compatible mounting pattern allows for use with third party monitor arms.

The stylus feels good in hand. Some hardware with replaceable batteries feels heavy with long use. Bosto eschewed AAA batteries for an internal, rechargeable solution. The lack of a swappable battery gives the stylus a lighter weight on par with Wacom’s battery free styli.

The replaceable nib sat a bit off center in the stylus. The part of me that wants all things to sit dead center and at ninety degree angles was perturbed, but this was more a problem with aesthetics than functionality.

As a self proclaimed budget product, I was impressed with the build quality of the 22U. It’s not uncommon to run across problems with any digital art hardware—Wacom or otherwise. Dead pixels, light leakage, styli which won’t hold a charge, and dust trapped under the glass are all common issues. The Bosto was solid. I experienced no hardware failures during my testing and the unit was problem free if short on bells and whistles.

Software and Drivers

There’s not much to say about the 22U’s software and drivers. The tablet driver is Windows compatible, not Mac, and offers a very spare feature set. I’ve heard tell of community made drivers for Mac and Windows both, but was not able to test them yet.

The tablet installed easily in Windows 7 and Windows 8 and was compatible with Photoshop and Manga Studio in my testing. Most of my drawing time is spent on Macs and in Linux. The 22U being ostensibly Windows only limited my use a bit, but I can’t hold that against it. It is advertised as such and should only be considered for purchase by Windows users.

I have a mixed studio with near equal numbers of Mac, Windows, and Linux machines and hope the community driven effort to expand compatibility bears fruit. However, don’t count on fan made hacks if you’re not on Windows. It’s always best to assume that support for such third party workarounds is apt to be spotty.

Performance and Place in the Pantheon of Art Hardware

The Bosto 22U Mini’s performance is best summed up as adequate. That’s not a knock against the hardware. Most faux-Wacom tech is terrible.

As all the non-Wacom manufacturers have risen in popularity, the quality of the underlying technology has bettered and, in some ways, converged. Little differentiates Huion from UC-Logic from UGEE from Bosto.

Two areas of continued variance between manufacturers have been the pressure curve and jitter during slow strokes. Some hardware requires strokes that are too hard to achieve full pressure. Some require strokes that are too light. None are just right. Goldilocks wouldn’t find a comfortable bed among the lot of them. Slow strokes task the report rate of the hardware and the interpolation of the driver—its ability to convert slow, jaggy input into smooth, even lines.

Most Wacom styli have terrible beginnings to their pressure curves. When new out of the box they perform better, but, shortly after breaking a stylus in, the first twenty five percent or so of the pressure curve blows by far too quickly. You can mitigate this by using custom pressure input settings and making the first fifty percent of your pressure curve firmer. That’s a bummer. Having spent tens of thousands of dollars on pricey Wacom tech over the last fifteen years, I expect more. Wacom’s app compatibility is top notch and they have the best slow-stroke jitter interpolation. They’re still the best option, but innovation has remained largely stagnant since their Graphire days.

Huion’s latest stylus tech tends to be too soft and quick to achieve full pressure. A light press maxes out their output robbing you of some middle-to-hard end of the pressure curve expression. They suffer from middling jitter problems with slow strokes. Their industrial design is top notch and their drivers have matured greatly over the last two years.

UC-Logic, the digitizer supplier for Yiynova and UGEE, has a stiffer pressure curve that requires more force to achieve full output. It’s stiff, but the UC-Logic tech has maybe the highest fidelity pressure curve in all digital art hardware I’ve tested. Wacom and Huion blow out their pressure curves too quickly and the UC-Logic tech tends to allow for a fuller range of expression. Jitter mitigation is slightly better here than in Huion tech, but is still worse than Wacom’s. Their industrial design tends to leave one wanting. They look and feel slapped together. The exception to this aesthetic black hole is UGEE who seems to be pushing the UC-Logic tech further than Yiynova. They’re relatively unknown and it’s a shame. They’ve made some of my favorite tech to date.

The Bosto 22U Mini uses a different digitizer than their other units according to discussions with their reps. Pressure input was a bit jagged with many tiny peaks and valleys during a single stroke, but that can be solved for in most software that offers a modicum of line correction. Here’s the interesting thing about Bosto’s new 22U. Overall stroke pressure sat somewhere between Wacom and UC-Logic. It was near the middle ground of pressure curves. That’s notable. That’s borderline exciting. Jitter was no worse than on UC-Logic tech but still lagged behind Wacom a bit. But Bosto has my interest. The 22U held its own.

Value

The 22U costs $50 to $100 cheaper than its mid-tier counterparts. If you’re running Windows, don’t mind a spartan set of driver features, and budget is your foremost concern, you could do worse.

I had issues with the digitizer technology in Bosto products prior and was not shy in heaping criticism their way. To their credit, they saw fit to send me this new monitor with a new, different digitizer inside knowing I wouldn’t pull punches. Performance and price are a decent value. I like where their product line is headed and hope they keep building on this momentum.

As is the case with nearly all my Cintiq alternative reviews, the addendum of “not bad for the money” applies in hefty amounts. If you’re simply unable to purchase Wacom hardware, this Bosto, Yiynova’s MVP22U (v3), and Huion’s GT-220 offer compelling options that each have benefits and drawbacks.

The Bosto 22U Mini left me pleasantly surprised. For many, I suspect their purchasing decision will depend on price and compatibility.

Details

Manufacturer

Bosto http://www.bosto.co/

Price at Time of Review

$649

You can help my reviewing efforts by using my Amazon affiliate link.

Huion GT-185 HD Unboxing

World’s first look at Huion’s new Cintiq alternative.

Hotkeys!

Check out my review of Huion’s GT-220 Cintiq alternative in the latest issue of ImagineFX!

Check out my review of Huion’s GT-220 Cintiq alternative in the latest issue of ImagineFX!

World’s first video review of Huion’s new Cintiq alternative tablet monitor, the GT-220. Available here.

The video quality is low and the audio cuts out a bit here and there. It’s my first time using OBS. That’s my excuse.

HUION GT-220 World’s First Unboxing

Huion’s new tablet monitor, the GT-220, is up for review. I have the world’s first look at the hardware and wanted to post a quick unboxing video.

The monitor is available here for preorder.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 vs. Wacom’s Cintiq Companion

Mentioned in this article:Microsoft Surface Pro 3 | Wacom Cintiq Companion

Which portable drawing tablet reigns supreme for digital artists?

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3.

I just received a review unit Surface Pro 3 from Microsoft. My Wacom Cintiq Companion is my most used art device. It’s my entire studio stuffed into a bag. It’s going to take a fantastic piece of hardware to unseat the Companion’s position as my alpha dog for art creation.

The Surface Pro 3 is a fantastic piece of hardware.

I won’t be delving too far into the specs of the machines in this first impression write-up, but I will boil down the differences between the two that have an impact in your workflow. What are the practical realities of using these devices? Why should I get one or the other?

A few years ago, no device akin to either of these options was mature enough to even consider for professional work. These two hardware juggernauts slugging it out spur innovation. No matter which device “wins,” ultimately we, as artists, are in a better place. But let me ease your mind. No matter which piece of art hardware you choose, you haven’t made a bad choice. Both are good in different, complimentary ways.

The Companion is a workhorse. I’ve beaten the crap out of it for months. I regularly draw files north of 18"x24" at 350-600dpi for as many as eighteen hours a day.

I’ve assigned my most frequently utilized shortcut keys and tools to its hotkeys and seldom use a bluetooth keyboard while working. Zooming, panning, rotating, color picking, brush resizing, undoing and redoing are all accounted for using the hardware hotkeys.

An example of work created entirely on a Cintiq Companion.

The matte screen is relatively high PPI. At 13" and 1920x1080, it’s one of the clearest screens I own. It isn’t reflective and colors are accurate with a wide gamut. The matte screen feels more like drawing on paper than glass.

The matte nature of the screen is provided by a thin layer of adhesive, anti-glare protection which is prone to scratches. From normal use, my screen has noticeable marks in my most stylus-scraped areas. I suspect that one could peel off this coating (as I did on older, desktop Cintiq models), but then you’re left with a glass, slick surface to draw on.

Distance between the glass and the screen causes cursor offset and parallax. All Wacom Cintiqs exhibit this behavior, but the Companion has the smallest gap of all of them. If it bothers you here, there are scant alternative options with less severe parallax.

Strokes are smooth with a bit of lag, but that’s the case with all Cintiq hardware. There’s little to no jitter in slow strokes. The 2048 levels of pressure are an industry leading figure. After breaking in the stylus, the first half of the pressure levels are met within a quarter of pressure applied to the stylus. Made less technical, that means that drawing feels a bit loose at light pressure. Ratcheting up your firmness at the driver level, or using app-specific pressure curve tweaking, ameliorates the problem, however.

The battery life could be better. The Cintiq Companion uses a slightly aged Intel processor that’s less energy efficient than its newer brethren. Heavy use in intensive art apps saps the battery in a few hours, tops. I carry a portable charger in my laptop bag and resign myself to charging the Cintiq whenever and wherever I can manage.

The Companion is sized akin to a powerful laptop that doubles as a tablet monitor with a level of portability to match. When I travel, it’s in a bag with some accompanying accessories. When you do unpack and plug in that required kit, however, you have a fully capable studio on the move. It’s no more or less portable than a mid-sized laptop. It’s no MacBook Air, but it’s not a 17" behemoth either. I split my time this year between two locations and was able to carry my whole studio in one laptop bag.

The Surface is more akin to an iPad that you can draw on while using full featured art apps with extreme portability. It feels like a sketchbook in form, function, and potential capability.

The screen is an astounding 12" at 2160x1440. Pixels are entirely indiscernible. This clarity is nice, but comes at a price. At times, you can feel the Surface sputter and chug as it attempts to zoom in on a canvas of a large art file. Rendering those pixels taxes my middle specification i5 model. As an art guy, I’d rather have performance than pixel density if I could only choose between the two. Both the Surface and Companion have beautiful displays with wide viewing angles and accurate color.

The, er, surface of the Surface is a glossy, slick glass. Drawing feels slightly less accurate than on a matte surface. A screen protector would likely fix the issue. The glass isn’t prone to scratches like the Companion. This category is pretty much a draw.

The 3:2 aspect ratio of the Surface is a lot more accommodating of portrait oriented drawing than the 16:9 of the Companion. The Companion is nearly too large and cumbersome to hold in your off-hand while you draw with your dominant one. The aspect ratio of the screen, and the lighter, smaller shape of the Pro, all contribute to the digital, portable sketchbook nature of the device.

Vertical drawing on the Companion is less than ideal.

When working with the Companion I sit the device on my table or lap using the provided stand and draw in a landscape orientation. When drawing on the Surface I tend to hold the device with one hand, portrait, while drawing with the other.

The lack of hotkeys impedes production workflows with the Surface. In much the same way that the aspect ratio and weight of the device lend it the air of a digital sketchbook, so does the lack of hardware bound shortcut keys.

I forced myself to use the Surface without a keyboard and clumsily plodded my way through tool selection, brush resizing, and color picking with my free hand using the touch screen. Apps that embrace the tablet based nature of the Surface work best. Manga Studio allows for a tablet forward interface option and it’s warranted here. Even with some apps making concessions for use on tablets, I was still slower on the Surface than the Companion while drawing. The hotkeys matter if you’re doing serious arting and the Companion has them in spades.

The most controversial aspect of the Surface ended up being one of the least worth remark. Ditching Wacom’s tablet technology, the Surface instead uses Ntrig’s art digitizer. I found touch input more reliable on the Surface than the Companion and stylus navigation outside of art apps less laggy on the Companion and slightly floaty on the Surface.

Pen pressure is reported as 256 levels but you’d never know it. I never left wanting for more pressure fidelity. The actuation pressure for the stylus feels steeper than comparable Wacom hardware. You’re lightest marks can sometimes be lost if you’re extremely light of touch.

The distance between the glass and stylus is lesser here than in the case of the Companion. Gains of accuracy that the lessened parallax might provide are lost by overall less accurate tracking of the pen tip. There’s jitter with slow strokes and a smidge more lag when drawing with the Ntrig than a Wacom digtizer. I have very steady hands. I make fast, fluid strokes. If your working style skews towards slow, deliberate mark making, bear the caveat of the jitter in mind.

Art app compatibility is a concern with the alternative hardware. Ntrig’s website has a driver update that adds WinTab compatibility to the Surface. At time of writing, I haven’t thrown a heap of apps at the Surface, but none have failed so far after installing the optional WinTab update.

The Surface Pro 3 would be better with a Wacom digitizer, but, in practice, I didn’t find the Ntrig to be a terrible detriment. Its inclusion is not reason alone to dismiss the Surface.

The Surface battery lasts for ages and uses a newer, more energy efficient processor than the Companion. I don’t bother to bring a bag when I take the Surface out with me. It, its type cover, and its pen are all I need to art on the go. It’s only slightly more of a burden than carrying an iPad and the portability trumps the more laptop-esque nature of the Companion if that’s your primary concern.

If you have a primary art workstation already and are looking solely for a digital sketchbook that’s easy to transport, has a stout battery, and runs full featured art applications, the Surface is a no brainer. If it were the only tablet monitor I had, I’d make due. It’s perfectly functional for production work.

The Companion is heavier. Its battery life gets lesser seemingly by the day. Its screen scratches easily. But it’s my personal choice for my primary art making device. The singular nature of the Companion overlaps in more areas with my needs as an artist. The pen digtizer is slightly better. The hotkeys speed up my workflow. It’s that simple.

However, you’d have to pry my Surface from my cold dead hands. It’s a sexy piece of hardware. It’s heaps more portable than the Companion and lasts longer to boot. Where I’ve taken the Companion to a coffee shop to work in the past, I’m almost certainly going to take the Surface now.

Each is a good choice. They just service slightly different use cases. If portability trumps efficiency, get the Surface. If you don’t mind losing a bit of freedom of movement and ease of toting to and fro, but need a full desktop replacement, get the Companion.

This is exactly the sort of use case where I’d rather be toting the Surface.

I’ll be offering a full review of the hardware mentioned in this article soon. In the meantime, you can support my digital art hardware reviews by purchasing Amazon products using my referral link.

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The Little Monoprice Graphics Tablet that Could

Huion H610 Pro Review

Huion H610 Pro, H610, & K58 Graphics Tablet Review

With the H610 Pro, H610, K58, and W58, Huion’s industrial design leapfrogs Monoprice’s older tablets and begs for comparison to Wacom. While the Monoprice tablets I reviewed previously were the best bang for your drawing buck at the time, these new Huion tablets offer a significant bump in specifications and fit and finish without a huge leap in price.

Huion’s line of tablets use similar technology to the UC-Logic pen digitizer found in Yiynova, Ugee, and older Monoprice hardware. Monoprice’s last-gen tablets were my highest recommendation for a cheap Wacom alternative, but there were some drawbacks. Monoprice’s hotkeys felt flimsy and the stylus was serviceable and utilitarian. No one would call the Monoprice tablets things of beauty, but it was easy to overlook these shortcomings given their price. At around ten percent of the cost of comparable Wacom tablets, with equal or better performance in many regards, the Monoprice line of tablets was my punk-rock drawing tool of choice when not using tablet monitors on my desktops.

Perfect for throwing into a laptop bag, and cheap enough to not have to worry about destroying during travel, the Monoprice filled a niche. Since that initial purchase, I’ve acquired more than two dozen additional UC-Logic based tablets and monitors for testing and possible review.

Aside from Yiynova’s U-designated line of graphics tablet monitors, few of those purchases have been noteworthy enough to warrant additional spotlight. I’m pleased to say that the Huion tablets reviewed here replaced my older Monoprice tablets as my go-to, portable drawing solutions.

And since, Monoprice has replaced their UC-Logic digitizer based offerings with rebranded Huion parts. Huion is the OEM of the latest generation of Monoprice tablets. If you’re buying a new Monoprice tablet, chances are it’s a rebrand of one of the pieces of hardware outlined below.

Hardware Specifications

The H610, K58, and W58 all have a digitizer with 2048 levels of pressure, 4000 LPI, and a report rate of 233 reports per second. The H610 Pro improves upon that slightly with 5080 LPI, a textured drawing surface, and a rechargeable styli. All tablets have detachable mini-USB cable connections and all but the H610 Pro come with battery operated styli.

The H610 and H610 Pro include eight user-programmable hotkeys and has a 10” x 6” active working area.

The K58 and W58 have a smaller, hotkey-less active area of 8” x 5.” In the case of the W58, an internal Li-Ion battery claims 30 hours of use before needing to be charged via it’s included mini-USB cable. The W58 can be used as a wired tablet while charging via your systems USB port.

The P80 is a rechargeable stylus with an internal Li-Ion battery that comes bundled with the K58. It claims 800 hours of continuous use before needing a recharge. In practice, I found the stylus held a charge for a few days at a time. Recharging is done via a USB cable that has a proprietary connector on one end that plugs into the stylus.

The P80 can be used with the other Huion tablets, but must be purchased separately.

Installation and Setup for the H610 and K58

Like all the other UC-Logic hardware I’ve tested, the biggest obstacle is neither price nor drawing capability, but initial setup. Make sure to download Huion’s customized UC-Logic driver directly from their site. Install it before plugging your tablet in for the first time.

In OS X, the tablet can behave strangely if you have third party mouse-steering apps installed. Logitech drivers and USB Overdrive are repeat offenders. An engineer at Adobe contacted me when his UC-Logic tablet’s cursor stuck to the top left corner of his screen and, after a few days of painstaking processes of elimination, we determined that his third party mouse app had stymied the tablet.

In Windows, be sure to install the drivers before plugging the tablet in. Windows has insidious default tablet drivers it will install otherwise. They don’t work well and you’ll swear there’s something wrong with your hardware. There isn’t. Deleting your HID stack in Device Manager is the only help here and even it may not work. You may have to reinstall a fresh copy of the OS. Additionally, in Windows 7 at least, disable Tablet PC services from the services menu. Uninstall Tablet PC components. Uncheck “Support Tablet PC Features” from the tablet driver icon in the system tray. Minimally, disable Pen Flicks. All of these things impact drawing performance.

One side effect of doing these reviews is that I’ve become defacto technical support on a whole host of common problems associated with nearly all graphics tablets. I can’t help everyone, but I do try. Please take my advice. Install the drivers before plugging the tablet in. Don’t use third party mouse mods. Graphics tablets everywhere will thank you. And so will I.

Installation and Setup of the W58

The wireless capability of the W58 is unique. The tablet works in both wired and wireless modes, but the initial setup is the same as its corded brethren. Aside from being finicky about software-before-hardware installation order, I encountered no installation issues in Windows.

In OS X, I was completely unable to get the W58 to work. When drawing a stroke, the beginning and ends would blob out to full pressure regardless of how light I pressed. While in wireless mode, attempting to open the PenTablet driver app in Applications would result in system freezes and application crashes. I tested the W58 on three MacPro towers with OSes ranging from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, a 2012 MacBook Air, and a new Mac Mini with the same results.

I wrote Huion asking for advice and they sent a second piece of hardware along. During testing, they said to try and use the tablet without any drivers installed. Despite this sounding entirely counterintuitive, I gave it a shot. No dice. The same problem occurred. Strokes blobbed out at their beginning and ends while appearing to respond accurately in the middle of their marks.

As it stands, I cannot recommend the W58 for OS X users. It’s a shame. The hardware was small and light enough that tossing it into my laptop bag as my default, laptop-centric graphics tablet solution would’ve been a no-brainer otherwise.

Performance in Graphics Applications

The H610 Pro, H610, and K58 performed well in both Windows and OS X. Slow, deliberate strokes showed some jitter and diagonal lines drawn at near 45 degrees seem to exacerbate the issue. This is a behavior common to all the Huion and UC-Logic-alike hardware I’ve tested.

I personally haven’t had issues with jitter as I tend to draw fast and loose with long, sweeping strokes. I seldom hover slowly and deliberately while mark-making a single line. If you are a hesitant line-maker, bear this possible caveat in mind.

The H610 Pro does a better job at mitigating this diagonal line jitter during slow strokes thanks to its upgraded internals and is my recommendation if you’re a slow mark maker.

The bundled, AAA-powered stylus is a bit stiff out of the box. I’ve owned over seven of these Huion styli and a stiff pressure curve has been consistent among them all. The harder pressure curve is a welcome change from the mushy, easy-to-blow-out pressure curve of Wacom hardware, though is a smidge stiffer than I would like.

The Li-Ion, rechargeable, aftermarket stylus has a pressure curve unique to any other UC-Logic styli I’ve tested. It feels in-hand like a Wacom stylus and has a pressure curve to match. The only drawback being that light pressure strokes blow out to full pressure without much effort. If their goal was to replicate a Wacom feel, warts and all, they’ve done it. The light pressure being so touchy is not a preference of mine and I didn’t use the rechargeable stylus much as a result. I’ve owned three of these rechargeable styli and all exhibited this behavior.

For the W58, performance in Windows was good. An occasional jitter or wonky mouse movement occurred with long use. I suspect those rare hiccups had to do with the 2.4ghz, wireless nature of the device. I enjoyed being less tethered to my workstation. I’m a big fan of workspace minimalism and the W58 appeals to the lizard cortex of my brain. If I’d managed to get the W58 working in OS X, I’d have been ecstatic.

Closing Thoughts

The H610 lived in my laptop bag for six months and the H610 Pro improved upon the H610 in enough small ways to warrant replacing it. It boasts 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity. The LPI is better. It has a detachable mini-USB cable. The industrial design of the stylus and tablet surface is akin to the Wacom tablets I cut my teeth on. The overall fit and finish feels high-end and not at all indicative of the price tag.

In all measures save for price, the Huion H610 Pro, H610 and K58 could be placed on a shelf next to Wacom tablets and the average on-looker would guess they were equals. If you’re in the market for a budget Wacom-alternative, the Huion H610 Pro is easy to recommend.

As per usual, shopping on Amazon using my referral link helps support my efforts to review digital art hardware.

Note: This is an update to my previous Huion review that corrects some numbers previously listed incorrectly by the manufacturer and adds the H610 Pro to the review lineup.

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Review: Monoprice 19" Tablet Monitor - Wacom Take Heed

Wacom has long held the crown as the top maker of graphics tablet hardware, but they have not iterated upon the technology in meaningful ways. The products have remained staid and safe and prices are high as ever. Graphics tablets are a market ripe for disruption.

The Monoprice 19" Tablet Monitor is poised to blow that market open. The extremely aggressive $389 price point is paired with the best overall hardware quality of any Cintiq competitor I’ve reviewed to date.

Hardware, Software, and Performance

The Monoprice uses the same digitizer technology as the Huion H610 which I reviewed highly. It has a 19" 1440 x 900 resolution TFT LCD, a pen digitizer with 5080 lpi resolution and a 200 RPS report rate, a rechargeable, lightweight stylus with 2048 pressure levels, and both DVI and VGA inputs. The monitor’s build quality is better than its sub-$400 price tag would imply and the stylus feels as light in hand as a comparable Wacom stylus despite its internal battery.

The unit is small, sleek, and streamlined in appearance. The glass is flushmounted to the plastic bezel and the display has a glossy finish. The included, VESA mount compatible stand allows for tilting the display forward and backward from nearly flat to almost vertical viewing angles.

The included VESA-mounted, adjustable stand.

The stylus responds quickly with little perceivable cursor lag in either OS X or Windows. Pressure input felt a bit loose. The Monoprice stylus is a rebranded Huion P80 stylus. I’ve owned several of Huion’s rechargeable styli and the one bundled with the Monoprice was the loosest of the bunch. Ratcheting up the firmness in the driver’s options ameliorated much of that feeling, however.

The drivers are a utilitarian affair with the requisite pressure curve and monitor mapping knobs and switches with one caveat. Multiple monitor support is currently absent in Windows. Multiple monitor setups work fine in OS X. Right and left click are the only assignable keys to map to the stylus side buttons in OS X, but middleclick is mappable in Windows. As there are no hotkeys on the monitor, you’ll be using a keyboard with your free hand anyhow, so I didn’t find the sparse options too limiting.

The utilitarian driver menus of the Monoprice 19" Tablet Monitor.

When drawing slow and diagonal lines, a small amount of wobble and jitter seeps in. Comparable to the performance of Intuos 3 era tech, this is nothing that will keep you from making detailed art, but, if you’re the sort to labor over slow, less decisive marks, you will likely notice some shake. I was able to complete all of my client work on the Monoprice and often hopped back and forth between it and my Cintiq Companion with no discernible break in workflow. Cintiqs are smoother with a slightly laggy, buttery feel. The Monoprice has more snap and less lag, but the strokes are more raw because they have less line correction at the driver level. Drawing on the Monoprice feels a bit better than drawing on Yiynova’s MSP19U though they have nearly identical internal hardware.

The weakest aspect of the Monoprice is its TFT LCD panel. The LED backlighting is clear and bright, brighter than all but the most recent Cintiqs, but viewing angles are shallow and the unit is best used at either a down-on-your-lap or nearly vertical angle. The more parallel you can keep the screen and your face, the more accurate the screen is going to look. I recommend picking up a monitor arm if your budget allows. Being able to position the unit at an optimal angle is important enough to warrant one. Colors skewed towards the cool, but were easily combated with a quick trip to the on screen settings menu of the display. If this unit had an IPS panel, I’d have little to critique.

I mounted the Monoprice on a monitor arm to combat the lackluster viewing angles.

Conclusion

For a price lower than a large Intuos tablet, let alone a Cintiq, and performance equal to the more expensive Yiynova MSP19U, it’s hard to go wrong with the Monoprice. Hell, you could disable its screen entirely and use it solely as a graphics tablet for another monitor and still come out ahead, dollar wise.

Would I recommend the Monoprice? Yes. In fact, of all the Wacom alternative hardware I’ve tested, it’s the easiest for me to give a thumbs up. There are caveats to the hardware, but the price is hard to argue against. The Monoprice is a worthy product that steals the crown away from the MSP19U as the best bang for your buck in graphics tablet monitor hardware, full stop.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

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