Choosing a graphics tablet

[OldRod]

I'm looking to get a graphics tablet. I have ~$200 to spend. I've been looking at the Wacom Pen and Touch, but then I see there are several different flavors of tablets in that same line.

I mainly want to play with doing web graphics and some isometric stuff for my browser game I'm working on.

Anyone got a recommendation?

[a_bertrand]

You will not get much for 200$ Either do not spend them, or increase your budget to take at least an A5 intuos. Better an A4 format but well that will be again more money. Think that if you go under a4 you will have an hard time to use it. I did that test myself and the first Wacom I barely used it as it wasn't really up to the level you can paint with it. With my intuos a4 I'm really happy, but it doesn't remove the need of the mouse for everyday usage.

[Jackolantern]

You will not get much for 200$ Either do not spend them, or increase your budget to take at least an A5 intuos. Better an A4 format but well that will be again more money. Think that if you go under a4 you will have an hard time to use it. I did that test myself and the first Wacom I barely used it as it wasn't really up to the level you can paint with it. With my intuos a4 I'm really happy, but it doesn't remove the need of the mouse for everyday usage.

You may actually be surprised. My wife has both an A4 and a newer generation Bamboo. Granted the Bamboos started off in the earlier incarnations as just a small tablet with low pressure levels designed for handwriting digitization, but have evolved over the last few years to just be a smaller Intuos that is quite capable of any drawing project. A lot of artists have outright dismissed the Bamboos because they have not kept up with the lower-end of the price spectrum and the evolution of Wacom's tablets in that range. My wife carries her Bamboo around with her i5 tablet, and has produced many great drawings with it that look every bit as good as her Intuos pieces. They are just smaller, which is how you are paying less for them. Obviously the $50 ones are probably still just for handwriting or GUI manipulation, but you could definitely get something that would work for art for $200.

I definitely don't think it is a "go top-end Intuos or go home" type situation anymore the way it used to be. And hell, Amazon even has one of the newer Medium Intuos pads for under $200 (the only bad reviews are for silly reasons, such as the pen being "too thin" or no Windows XP compatibility).

[OldRod]

I'm seeing several models that get good reviews and are in the $200 price range. But it's so confusing now. There's Bamboo, Wacom, Intuos... which all look the same to me. And each one has several versions (Create, Pen and Touch, etc.). I was hoping someone here would have recently gotten one and could shed some light

[hallsofvallhalla]

I have two wacom tablets and they just sit in the closet until my daughters grabbed them for coloring. I would not recommend getting one unless you plan on doing art full time. That is only from my own wasting of money however so you might get more use out of one.

[OldRod]

I actually have a Genius tablet from like 4-5 years back. I used it quite a bit. Or I should say I *tried* to use it... it was a piece of junk - it worked, but the pen had no sensitivity and the buttons were laid out strange, etc. I'm just wanting to try again with a better tablet. Kinda like how I have a guitar that I play a few times per year that I'm going to get back out of the closet next month when RockSmith 2 comes out

[hallsofvallhalla]

both pen and touch graphics tablets I have are great as far as sensitivity. They were like $99.

[Jackolantern]

Wacom is the tablet maker, and is the brand. IMHO, they are the only company that makes drawing tablets that are worth a damn. Most non-Wacom tablets come with all kinds of horror stories about them being junk (like the "Genius Tablet", unfortunately).

Bamboo is the lower end of the scale for Wacom, and includes small, portable tablets. Bamboo used to not be a respected art tablet because they used to come with very low pressure sensitivity that was only useful for handwriting recognition. But they have evolved to be nearly equal to Intuos in pressure sensitivity. Intuos is Wacom's main tablet line, with larger tablets. They used to have another type called Cintiq that was very expensive, since the tablet was actually an LCD monitor, but they have largely been replaced by Windows 8 tablets with Wacom digitizers. I am not even sure if Wacom still makes Cintiq.

[OldRod]

Yeah, I've seen the Cintiq and they are amazing... but incredibly out of my price range.

If you ever get a chance, check out the Photoshop work of Bert Monroy. He used to do photoshop tutorials for various sites. He does hyper-realistic art, drawn by hand in Photoshop using a Cintiq. He did a picture of Times Square that is over 6.5GB on the disk. But wow, the accuracy and photo-realism is absolutely amazing

[Jackolantern]

I don't think the Cintiq really has much of a place anymore. Wacom is licensing their digitizers to Windows 8 tablet manufacturers at the same levels of sensitivity as the Cintiqs, or at least close enough to be comparable (a human can't tell much of a difference over 1024 levels), they cost less than a Cintiq, plus they are full i5/i7 computers. Really seems like a no brainer if someone was thinking about a Cintiq.