This is basically Wacoms fault - they sat on their patents basically only producing expensive high end devices, preventing others from providing high volume basic but cheap devices. This was the most apparent in the LCD tablet are where until recently was just the high end Wacom made Cintiq that was insanely expensive and nothing else.

I believe that we lost at least one generation of digital artists due to this - not everyone can be productive by a non-LCD tablet and even those have been overpriced.

Thankfully with the main Wacom tablet patents finally gone, the situation seems to be finally recovering, with many new, mostly Chinese, LCD tablet makers and a lot of people using high end Android and Apple tablets for drawing (which are still much much cheaper than what Wacom used to want for a simple LCD tablet display or for what it sells its bulky mobile studio devices these days).

But to this day, we can still see the technical dept caused by Wacom blocking a whole area of HID devices for ~20 years - drivers for non Wacom LCD drawing displays are still a mess and there is a lack of quality drawing software, especially on Android.

So good to se Krita helping to address at least one of these issues. :)

Wacom has been making cheap tablets for ages, I started with a $100 Graphire back around 2000, the specs and name for the low end tablet has changed but you can still get a tablet with a small working area for about US$100. You can get last year’s entry-level tablet for even less; if you have any kind of art friend connections you could probably find one for the cost of shipping.

There has been no lack of cheap non-screen drawing tablets, and I really think that there’s nothing even resembling a whole generation of digital artists who done exist because of the lack of screen tablets. There’s a FUCKTON of pro artists out there who were enabled by a cheap drawing tablet and a pirated copy of (insert art program here).

There have been cheap tablets around for years, many of those work fine. I remember having a Kurta tablet in the late 90s that cost like $60 or so.

For me the gating factor was Linux support: along that axis, there was Wacom (which had it), and everybody else (which didn't). These days, even though the kernel and X drivers are called "wacom", they support all manner of budget tablets under a variety of brand names (though you will want to check to see if a particular model is supported, and how well).

LCD tablets are nice (albeit for a while it was cheaper to simply buy a tablet-based notebook computer than a Cintiq of equivalent size) -- but not having one doesn't prevent you from being proficient at digital art. Using a regular tablet is a great way to get started; the extra precision offered by an integrated LCD display extends your reach and productivity, it doesn't gate being able to produce at all.

From my experience using a non screen tablet makes the learning curve much steeper while a screen tablet feels much more natural due to people being used to seeing what they are drawing from writing and drawing on paper.

I have seen this one some festivals where they set up a couple Wacom LCD tablet devices for people to draw on - there was a lot of interest and basically everyone was able to start drawing in a couple minutes. Seeing what you are drawing on the screen and not in front of you basically throws all the muscle memory people have from paper drawing and writing out of the window.

The leading brand is quite expensive (at least here in Germany), especially when it comes to reasonable sizes (A4/letter). I've been putting this off for years.

Finally - a few months ago - I aquired something remarkable cheaper, a chinese Gaomon M106K. It turned out, it is not cheap at all in the other sense of the word. Good quality and support at least for my use case (a bit different, handwritten formulas and sometimes some sketched diagrams). But my youngest kids use it for painting with Krita too.

The huion tablets are just as good if not better than wacom.

That's what I thought as well, but my experience contradicts that. Wacom is expensive, but it still leads in terms of sensitivity and accuracy. The pressure levels and other specs don't tell the full story.

On both my iPad Pro (2017) and an open-box Huion H610 Pro (pretty old) I saw stairstepping behavior when drawing a straight line with a ruler on a diagonal. It wasn't very pronounced on the iPad, but it was still there. If you draw the stroke quickly, the smoothing kicks in and straightens it. I'm pretty sure this is a normal side effect of the tech used to identify the grid coordinate of the stylus. But the wobbling was notably bad on the Huion. https://imgur.com/a/iPNZzrY

When I got a Wacom Intuos Pro PTH660 (Amazon renewed), the same test without smoothing showed a perfectly straight line, even when drawing quite slowly.

I don't know why the Wacom is better. Maybe it's got a higher resolution grid for detecting the pen location. Or maybe it's just got better tuned drivers. It's also much easier to freehand accurate lines and ellipses on the Wacom.

You generally can't trust the reviews of Wacom alternatives on YouTube. As reported by Aaron Rutten, most of the companies are not looking for fair and unbiased reviews: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twy5Wo8m284&t=337

I got lucky years ago running into sales for a bluetooth version of the Wacom tablet (540WL) and the wireless option does somehow "sets you free" while drawing... But they are expensive, yes.

Nobody wants A4 tablet trust me its not worth it. Ive seen so many pros replace them with A5 or even A6 because its better and more convinient.

On the other hand any other brand than the leading brand is truly terrible.

Actual pros replace them with cintiq or similar and are always larger than A4. I've never seen a full time designer move down size, because you lose fidelity at the same zoom level and are constantly fiddling with zoom which is a source of major frustration

Of course you want cintiq as big as possible but not tablet. With A4 you get to a point where you have to move a lot around the table with hand in front of you while you are looking straight at your screen its just akward. You dont have space for keyboard etc.

I can corroborate this. A full size tablet is not always ideal. Display tablets like Cintiqs benefit from larger size because you are drawing 1:1 on a screen. The size allows for comfortable viewing as well as full arm movements on a surface that resembles a drafting table. However, traditional graphics tablets require you to draw on a separate surface while looking up at a monitor. The screen is mapped to the tablet surface, so to move the 10 inches on a 27" monitor to reach a button, you might instead only move your pen tip 1 or 2 inches. In this case, it's often easier to draw using small movements, and zoom in and out as required to work on structure or detail.

Using a large tablet is like using a mouse with the sensitivity turned down. It quickly becomes frustrating having to move your arm around so much to manage the interface, especially when you don't have a direct connection between what you're looking at and touching.

The difference is why someone might use a steno pad or moleskin journal rather than a full-size legal pad.

An illustrator friend bought an A3 Wacom years ago. It was so big that if you put legs on it it’d be a reasonable sized desk by itself.

He ended up changing the mapping to only use a small portion near the front as he could barely reach the back.

I'm doing this for my A4-sized tablet too. At times. I still have the option (and I'm using it) for the full tablet area. I don't have this for the postcard-sized scribblers.

I do! This doesn't make sense to me. I have a Galaxy Note 12.2, and it's great, but bigger would be better (it's not quite A4). I also have a 12"×9" Wacom Intuos, 12" Surface Pro, 15" Surface Book 2 from work. All of those would be even better bigger (but the work laptop wouldn't fit in my backpack any more). I have a small Wacom tablet too, and it's too small to be very useful.

Touchscreens and Tablets are something very different. Sure you want as big screen as possible.

I bet most people who switch to touchscreens never want tablet back. Many people prefer tablets over touchscreens because you don't have to slouch.

Yeah, I am a pro artist and I have played with screen tablets and I do not like the way they make me hunch over my work surface and ruin my back, I really like that I can have my screen at the proper height above my desk and my tablet at the most comfortable place on my desk. No slouching, no achy spine, no ending up with nose prints on the screen because I hunch closer instead of using the zoom capabilities.

Devices like the Galaxy Tab S6 are basically a very powerful Android tablet with low latency high precision pen input (also does pressure and tilt detectio) via the supplied S pen (uses basically the same battery free technology as Wacom tablets).

As I mentioned, I have two graphics tablets (i.e. without screens), both Wacom, one large and one small. The small one is not very useful, and the larger one (~A4 drawing area) would be even more useful a bit bigger.

I would be interested in seeing videos of how people draw with tablets and touchscreens. Esp drawing with a small A6 tablet.

> Nobody wants A4 tablet trust me its not worth it.

Why should I do so when I have my own experience?

> On the other hand any other brand than the leading brand is truly terrible.

So you've tried them all? Not to talk about the use cases...

True i havent tried them all. Ocassionaly somebody around has some wierd brand and it has never been really good. But it might just be certain feeling wacoms have that is something acquired and might not mean it's better.

It's possibly it's something the Wacom drivers is doing (smoothing, etc). There's a game called osu! where lots of people play with graphics tablets, and a lot of people use cheaper chinese (Gaomon) tablets, with open source drivers that let you emulate the smoothing of Wacom drivers.

https://github.com/hawku/TabletDriver

Super interesting never heard of this. I thought its software because hardware could be copied. Also the big difference are usually other things than movement/pointing its pressure and tilt where Wacom is pretty great.

what kind of price are we taking about? because a second hand surface pro 3 is probably cheap these days and could be used for a lot more than a wacom tablet, playing music, watching videos etc

$50.

Not for a Wacom with form factor >= A4. These have easily a price tag in the higher three-digit Euro range (and even more). Things like the A5 (!) Bamboo slate _start_ at 100 EU.

@parent Of course - I also switched for ebooks from a dedicated reader to a tablet. But I'm still missing the ability for reading in the full sun, power for two weeks w/o charging, easiness on the eyes.

Similar - but harder to tolerate - things apply to a painting tablet. You cannot replace it simply by a multi-function device without losing quite a lot functionality.

I was talking about the GAOMON the GP mentioned.

I am constantly amazed at what they are able to do with it. I was just a minute ago explaining to my younger daughter the concept of layers and the first thing she did with it was to separate an object to which she wanted to apply a special filter. Without even thinking about it.

This takes me back to when I was 12 and discovered layers in Photoshop 6. Having always been frustrated with my drawings being all matted together in Paint/ClarisWorks/etc, layers blew my mind and hooked me on the concept of digital art.

Layers are a great example of how simple tools can act as a multiplier for creativity and inspiration.

I lost my PC graphics virginity with Corel DRAW (I don't remember the version). Man, it was so inspiring... I could never get used to Adobe Illustrator afterwards, it just did not seem logic after working with Corel Draw for years.

They've recently published a revamped version with Mac compatibility and I bought it just for the sake of good old times, although I'm far from doing any graphic work anymore.