Hi all,
It seems I've been on a real spending spree :(
The Wacom 9x12" Intuos3 tablet arrived today.
It's quite big...
Now that I have it set up, here are a few initial impressions. Please forgive all the rambling that follows :)
First of all the positive points:
The new pen is more comfortable than the old one (I have upgraded from an Intuos 4x5). It is significantly longer though, so flipping it over to use the eraser tip is a little more difficult.
The buttons and touch-strips are going to be fantastic. I've set them up for Photoshop: increase/decrease brush size, 'option' modifier (equivalent to the Alt key), space (for scrolling) and the touch strip zooms the image in and out.
The driver software is really good. At first sight I thought they'd removed a lot of the wonderful features of the previous drivers, but that is not the case. They'd merely shifted them. Wacom tablets are a rare breed in the fact that their great hardware that isn't crippled by lousy software.
There is *zero* electronic interference from my monitors (a major reason why I'd bought the new tablet).
The USB cable can come out either the side or the rear. This is a brilliant little detail. I hope that whoever thought of it got a big bonus. I do wonder if they could have put a plug on the cable so you can shift across to the right-hand side. But for me the left is OK.
I like the ability to have the tablet in portrait or landscape orientations, but I'll probably never use that feature.
Now some negatives.
The only complaint I have about the software is that I can't simply copy settings around between users - I had to set each one up individually. Sure, each user gets to totally personalise their tablet, but if I want to set everyone up with the same default settings as a starting point, I have to do it manually (it doesn't help that 3 of the 4 users on my computer are me). I'd also like to see a button to copy the settings for the left-side buttons to the right-side buttons. These are just minor niggles about convenience though: once it's set up I don't have to worry about it anymore.
Another minor annoyance is the blue LED. Prof. Nakamura really did deserve that 8 million dollars [see below] but I still prefer the green/orange LED in the older tablet. A bit of diffusing would be nice, too. And put a brighter green LED in there as it's quite a bit dimmer than the blue one.
I'm not going to whinge about the desk space it takes up, especially as I lose half the active area due to having 1:1 mapping across two screens. There's no point complaining when I had the option of buying a smaller tablet :)
I prefer the older pen holder, which holds the pen upright at an angle. With the new holder it's either straight-up vertical, or completely horizontal.
Beware of the touch strips when using the tablet as a wrist rest (I hope this thing isn't emitting too many EM fields into my arms).
I'd prefer a less shiny finish around the edge but it doesn't bother me. The orangey-red paint on my office walls is much more disturbing :)
That's about it for now. If you've been thinking about one, stop thinking and just buy it. There's a good reason why Wacom users rave about their tablets.
Cheers,
- Dave
BTW, Prof. Shuji Nakamura is the inventor of the blue LED. He recently won a court battle for $200M with his previous employer due to the economic bonanza it created for them (note this is was done under Japanese employment law; I doubt you could do this anywhere else), but they negotiated a settlement of $8.1M after an appeal judgement.
