Which Cintiq To Buy

When choosing the best Wacom tablet for your specific needs, what should you looking for? Start with the number of levels of pressure sensitivity, which suggests how closely the drawing on screen will resemble your actual pen marks. The more, the better. If you're a beginner or casual drawer, you'll probably find the lower end of 2,048 perfectly fine, but if you're a pro or semi-pro you may prefer more more.

Which Cintiq To Buy

Download File

Also consider the size and weight of the tablet, especially if you expect to travel with it. And note the resolution, which Wacom generally measures in lines per inch (lpi). In practical terms, you need about 1,000lpi to see your drawing in high definition.

This easy-to-use tablet comes with three pre-installed creative software that helps you get started. The Intuos Small Bluetooth tablet is best suited for drawing manga art, retouching your photos, or painting digital watercolors. The tablet with EMR (Electro-Magnetic Resonance) technology is super slim and lightweight which makes it very easy to carry. WIth 7 inches active display, the tablet has 4 customizable ExpressKeys that provide you with faster and efficient shortcuts.

The delicately etched glass reduces parallax and offers a distinctive, tactile drawing experience that simulates the feel of a pen on paper. Additionally, every mark appears exactly where you want it to, thanks to our unique bonding agent which pulls the glass as near to the LCD as possible.

Wacom Intuos Pro Paper Medium is the best tablet for digital art. With a built-in 5,080 LPI resolution, it is a creatively designed tablet for artists and comes with the Wacom Pro Pen 2, which has 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity. Simply by placing a piece of paper on the tablet, you can draw anything you like and it will be displayed on the tablet.

Wacom Intuos Pro (Medium) is the best tablet for beginners and amateurs to get started with graphic designing. The medium size 10-inch screen with 2540 LPI resolution is great to learn and draw. There are multiple functions and a great paper edition which enables the user to automatically convert paper sketches into digital files, as you draw to speed up the work.

I hope you enjoyed this article and now have a good idea about which Wacom tablet is right for you. If you are ready to start drawing some of your own cartoons, feel free to check out some of the free drawing tutorials on this site.

If you, like me, love to draw but now want to take things digitally you need a drawing tablet! Wacom is one of the, if not the best, drawing tablet brands on the market. But which tablet is suitable for beginners?

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

iOS software ecosystem favors newcomers and outside thinking, bringing to the market programs like Procreate and Paper by Fifty Three, for drawing, or even Astropad, which turns and iPad into a Wacom Cintiq replacement. Traditional software companies are also investing in this market. Take a look at SketchBook by Autodesk and the offerings from Adobe that transform the iPads into companion devices for the desktop Creative Suite.

I could have written this EXACT question myself! 13 yr old daughter/ topic marker user and pencil...

Don't know which to buy! She wants the pro, but I'm not sure because she really hasn't used digital art before and we have no software beyond the basic draw programs her computer came with.

Any suggestions?

I'm currently 16 and really am looking for a cintiq since I'm more of a traditional artist and visual hand is very important so the cintiq is more of a need, just not sure which one. I was thinking either the companion 2 or the 22hd touch

I urge anyone considering a Wacom to read up the cintiq companions power issues. Wacom publicly swears they fixed the issue that affected the 1, however multiple users have reported similar issues with their companion 2.

Thank you for your information. It was very helpful, however I still have a couple of questions, since I am not very good a drawing.Can I also use a tablet for selective coloring of a photo, I mean, Is it possible to have the photo scan or copy to a tablet itself so i can fallow along the lines better...? If so which model would do this sort of task? Thanks again.

That is a brilliant tip....being able to trace your artwork by placing it over the tablet! Thanks :- ) I'm just about to take the plunge from illustrating on paper with a few amendments in photoshop.. to working purely digitally - feels quite daunting - I've not managed to actually try a cintiq only see online demos etc. but it certainly seems to be the way to go for a more natural spontaneous transition.

I'm seaching for the best available tablet to use with GIS products (saga GIS, GRASS, and ESRI ArcGIS 10). However, the wacom site and google did not really help.

Suggestions about a site where a comparison between models (maybe even of different producers?) is possible / presented?

Just for the record: wacom has an annoncement of the DTU-2231, which seems to sell as PL-2200 by now. However, techspecs and compatibility are more hidden than presented. And wacoms website is pure consumer bullshitting. I need more "professional" information.

Hi, Nikki. First of all, thank you for the kind comments. ;)

I'm not so sure about the inkling. It's been marketed by Wacom as a sketching device and I think this is an appropriate approach, since it's not very precise, having +/- 5mm accuracy near the page corners.

It outputs vector artwork, which is a plus, but I'm not sure about the quality of it. The best way to draw vector shapes is to use the traditional bÃzier curves and I'm sure a freehand vector drawing would have an insane amount of points.

I'd get a traditional pen tablet instead, unless your work requires quick sketching and you're more familiar with drawing on paper.

Check out this two reviews with some real world usage examples.

DigitalArts

Robert Hranitzky

This is an excellent article. I am in a similar situation to StephenB where I want a buy a tablet, but I only want one to suit my purposes and don't want or need to upgrade (funnily enough I too draw in pencil, ink, erase lines and then scan. I hope to ink directly on the PC to save mistakes on really good pencil work and not have to worry about erasing lines). I also wanted to choose between the Intuos4 Medium and the Bamboo Create and feel that maybe the extra pressure sensitivity (is 1024 really not enough?), tilt sensitivity, touch ring and expresskeys don't justify the huge leap in price between the two.

Which brings me to something that I have never found an answer for. Does tilt sensitivity really make a difference in terms of how the tablet senses the way you hold the pen? That was something that worried me as I would have to go for the Intuos4 if it is really much more accurate from pen nib to cursor compared to the Bamboo. I wondered if you had to hold it in such a way that seems unnatural just so the tablet senses its coordinates better. I haven't been able to try either tablet so I don't really know.

I'm a traditional artist trying hard to transition to digital, but I really don't have the money to try something and then upgrade, which is why I want something that is suitable for what I want it to do (cartoons, sketches, editing stop motion animation frames, etc. Currently have a 22" monitor) and stick with it to master it. I won't be using the touch features of the Bamboo (if that is the better choice), it's all about the accuracy for me more than anything else. I doubt even 2048 levels of pressure can handle even the lightest touch of a pencil on paper, so I believe the pressure is not really that important either.

I hope this isn't TOO long and I'd love to hear your suggestions!

Thanks a lot Fabio.

I had also emailed Wacom too to ask them and forgot to ask something else. Does the Bamboo Create's pen have a pressure sensitive eraser? I know the Bamboo Fun does (well in one of their videos it was mentioned), but there isn't a whole lot of info on specs like that.

I'm still a little worried about getting the Bamboo Create as I don't plan to upgrade after it (seriously too poor), so I'm wondering if the Intuos4 is really my only option. I would like to aim for a Dell U2410 monitor in the future which would add another 2" to my screen estate, plus I'm working on a type of special overlay with a small LCD screen that can clip onto the tablet (effectively turning it into a DIY Cintiq, but not voiding the warranty) could the Bamboo Create still handle that?

Sorry for the extra questions. By the way, the chart doesn't have the Bamboo Create on it yet. What is the maximum resolution you think it could support (monitor or otherwise)?

Hi, Pablo.

The Create is much cheaper than the Intuos4 and offers more bang for the buck. It is sufficient for most users' needs and has an unique advantage: touch input, which comes handy for use with OS X Lion.

If your display area is no bigger than 24" and you're going to use it for graphic design, mostly vector illustration and general use, the Bamboo Create would suit your needs just fine. I'm also a graphic designer and I've used the Bamboo precursor, called Graphire, for many years. I have an Inutos4 Medium now.

The Intuos is more robust, has better resolution, more accessories and tilt support on the pen. You can't go wrong with it.

If your illustration style is more like natural media and you use programs like Photoshop and Painter to simulate paper and ink textures, the Intuos may be better due to the additional resolution and tilt support.