Several years ago, I was given a Wacom Whack 'em! ArtPad II. It's worked fine for me. But it's connected via a 9-pin Serial connector, with a supplemental external power supply. My computer doesn't HAVE a 9-pin serial port, and frankly the idea of searching out and testing one or several USB-to-9-pin adapters, all while trying to get this relatively ancient tablet to work with Windows 7 64bit, jugging drivers and whatnot.. it gives me a headache just thinking about it.
I've been trying to convince myself to get a new tablet, since I got the computer in 2009, but I always seemed to balk at the price. The one I had, had been a gift from a friend. I didn't have to pay for it, and I've honestly only ever used it on a couple dozen projects. Paying the high price (upwards of $150) for a new one has always seemed a bit extravagant for something I rarely use.
Anyways, last night, Cheesius was showing me some pictures of the awesome DIY repair job* he was doing on his aging digital camera, and he happened to put his camera on top of his Wacom tablet when he took the pictures to show me his progress. When I noticed the Wacom logo, I was suddenly like "OMG you have a reasonably recent Wacom, what model is it, is it USB? how do you like it?"
(* - really though, it was an amazing camera mod, the battery case door was not staying shut, so he epoxied it shut, then dremeled out the front side of the battery box, to insert the batteries that way. It was like Red Green meets MacGyver, and I wholeheartedly approve. Awesome way to get another few more months of use out of an aging camera!)
Cheesius and I started swapping links back and forth, when I eventually came upon information on the Wacom Bamboo "Pen and Touch" (which, I was sad to discover, is not actually made out of Bamboo).
We were able to find someone selling factory refurbished models for essentially half the retail price. After reading the reviews, I realized that aside from one anomalous review, all of the reviews were generally quite positive, and even the one anomalous bad experience STILL said that the product worked well. While some indicated that the product itself didn't meet their hopes, none of the reviews seemed to have any "DOA" type experiences with the fact that they were refurbished.
So I ordered one. Really, at $60 I couldn't justify NOT getting one.
I'm looking forward to receiving it next week. There have been a lot of neat new drawing applications coming out, like livebrush, and the really awesome sketchy draw tool on pixlr.com. I'm sure there are others too, these are just the first ones I could think of.
Of course this tablet (can we still call them tablets?) isn't an iPad or anything, it's purely an input device... but it CAN do multi-touch, which means it can bring "the power of the iPad" to my desktop (or netbook). I'm not sure I honestly have much use for multi-touch, I've been using a mouse for ages and ages.. but I'll play with it a bit.
Mostly I'm just looking forward to being able to use it as a drawing tablet. Sometimes, particularly when airbrushing textures for skins, it's way more intuitive for me to use a pen, than a mouse.
No comments:
Post a Comment