A quick tour of the Wacom Cintiq 21UX Intuos 4 Tablet

We present to your attention a review of the Wacom Cintiq graphics tablet from our illustrator Evgenia Rodina ( jodybastet ):

One of the goals at the recent Creativefuture 2010 conference for me was to “talk” with the exciting new Wacom Cintiq tablet. Every professional is anxious about good tools, so I immediately went to the Wacom exhibition stands. There was a dense crowd of curious people, and therefore there was very little time for a test drive, others wanted to draw at the back of the head. After waiting for the queue, I proceeded to the "tasting".

What trifle? I chose the Cintiq 21UX Intuos4 . :)

1. Beautiful black tablet. Design in style Intous4. Large and bright screen. In fact - a monitor on which to draw.
2. The screen warms up, in cold weather you can warm frozen hands on it :)
3. From the surface of the screen, where I touch the stack, to the luminous area (roughly speaking, where the drawn line appears) there is some distance. Slight, no more than a millimeter, but there is. That is, the sensations are not the same as paper + pencil suggests. You paint through a thin layer of plastic at a distance. My colleagues expressed their doubts: what about exactly pixel? I think the zoom function and a matter of habit will save us.
4. Magic Photoshop CS5 at the exhibition slowed down. You draw a line and wait for it to appear on the screen. Probably, there are still some errors of interaction between the program and the tablet.
   ')
   
   Lyrical digression. In the photo someone's hands draw on one of the small models. In my opinion, if you buy, then immediately a large tablet, which can replace you with a full-fledged monitor.
   
   
5. The tablet can be tilted to varying degrees, angles from 10 to 60 degrees are available, it can be rotated and adjusted under the "left-handed" and "right-handed." For me, the inconvenience was that inclination that you can see in the photo. The elbow either hung in the air or leaned on the keyboard. And for drawing you need an emphasis of the hand, otherwise it quickly gets tired. I think it can be solved individually by setting yourself a workplace. Yes, and he needs a lot of space on the table. And yet - I wanted to put it on my knees, like an album for drawing.
   
6. It seems that it is possible to connect the tablet to the monitor in order to be able to see the workflow both directly at hand and on the monitor. However, for large Cintiq models, the tablet screen is sufficient.
7. There are no changes visually in the stack, it is the same as in other tablets. One of the visitors tried to draw on the tablet, holding the stack in his hand, like a pencil artist - it looked funny. I can not say anything about this.
8. I don’t use the ExpressKeys key in my work, so I was uncomfortable with scaling the screen and changing tools, I had to lower my eyes to the keyboard. Probably buying a Cintiq would have to learn. :)
   

My conclusion is - Wacom Cintiq is fun, but nothing more. If we buy it, then it’s not a trifle with the size of the device and immediately buy as large as possible. For professional work, more than enough magnificent Wacom Intuos4. Touch sensitivity and tilt support are the same, and the lack of a luminous screen at hand can be experienced by compensating for this with the price of the device. In the final sense, it is just a tool. :)