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| And the winner is ... |
I've been deep in the
process of preparing a grant application to the Arts Council of Wales
for a new project recently. One of the things I want to fund is the
replacement of my tablet PC, which after several years and a couple
of repairs gave up the ghost at the end of my last project.
The last model was an
HP Tx2500 series convertible tablet. It originally came with Windows
Vista 32 (in Spanish), it weighed a ton, it had a battery life of
less than 3 hours, and it overheated to the point where it was
uncomfortable to hold, which was eventually the cause of its demise,
as the graphics chip eventually de-soldered itself from the
motherboard. I installed the Windows 8 Beta release on it, and it
worked great, but I had to get it fixed twice, but eventually decided
it was beyond repair and sold it for spares on eBay.
The point was, it had
two major advantages – it had a Wacom pressure-sensitive pen for
screen input, which meant I could draw on it, and it ran Windows.
“Why would that be an advantage?”, I hear you ask ... simple –
because my weapon of choice for making fabulous drawings on a tablet
is ArtRage, a
'natural materials' graphics package which is absolutely the best
thing for drawing on a PC. There is also a version for iPad, but
Apple never designed that for a pressure-sensitive pen, so that makes
it a no-brainer (that and the fact I want to run Zbrush
and other packages on it as well).
So ... the tablet
market is changing fast, and I looked for a comparative review of all
the available models which might be specifically suitable for
artists. Guess what? There isn't one, so.... here we go. Disclaimer –
I haven't been able to try these – I'm just comparing features
here. It took a while just to compile the list, and it will doubtless
be out of date soon, but:
Some of these models
aren't yet available at the time of writing (Oct. 2013) but are
expected soon, so they're in. The list of features I've included in
the table, by the way, won't be relevant to everyone, and is based on
things that I've found an irritation in my current cheap Android
not-very-arty tablet. The important stuff is there, though –
screen size, resolution, CPU, memory, storage space, and price.
Remember, the common factor here is – they all have
pressure-sensitive pen input. I haven't bothered noting the number of
pressure-levels, as my old PC had 512, so pretty much anything is an
improvement.
I'm not going to
discuss every model in detail – you can go read the manufacturers'
blurb for yourself, but I will comment on a few particularly relevant
points here:
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| Samsung ATIV Tab 3 |
First up is the Samsung ATIV Tab 3. It's just become available, and it gets a special mention
because it's cheap and compact. Cheapest (£489) and most compact of
all the models here in fact, so if you're on a very limited budget
it's probably worth a try. It's basically like a Galaxy Note 10.1 with the
Wacom S-Pen – except it runs Windows 8 instead of Android and will
therefore run standard Windows 8 software like ArtRage. A very
elegant solution as far as I can see. Not ideal in my case – low
CPU spec, low memory, and I had the Note 10.1 for a while and found
the S-Pen too small and fiddly, and it skidded on the glossy screen.
As I say though, if you're on a budget and you'd like a Win 8
sketchpad – this could be ideal.
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| Panasonic UT-MB5 |
Let's jump to the other
end of the scale – the humongous Panasonic UT-MB5 will be released
shortly. It's a Windows 8 tablet with a 20 inch (yes, you heard
right) 4000 pixel display. Aimed squarely at architects, car
designers and the like who need precision ... maybe it would be great
for art, but the pen looks quite big and clunky to me – not sure
why it should be. Also, you'll be using it on mains power most of the
time as battery life is a stated 2 hours (!). The main disadvantage,
though, is the price of £4,500 – I can't see the Arts Council
springing for that!
In the mid-range of
prices there's quite a lot of choice, and I suspect one is pretty
much as good as another with the choice being mainly down to looks,
and where you get the fastest CPU/most memory/most storage for your
money. The MS Surface Pro is a good bet at £719 for the 128GB model,
but wait a bit and get the Samsung ATIV Tab 7 when it arrives and
you'll get the same spec. with a bigger screen (11.6” as opposed to
10.6”) for £31 more.
The Toshiba is
overpriced, and the HP is under-specced (plus, sorry HP but my
previous experiences with your laptops have not been good – see above
– and that's sadly not the only example). Panasonic have the
extra-tough FZ-G1 on the cards, but it's much more money (£1,800)
than similar spec. machines from other manufacturers. If being able
to drop your tablet in a bucket of water from a great height and
retrieve it unscathed is a priority, it might be for you, though.
The Lenovo ThinkPadTablet 2 looks like an elegant device. It's low-spec, but it's cheap
at £540. It's one of a trio of devices with a smaller 1366 x 768
screen (most of the ones above are 1920 x 1080), the others being the
Fujitsu Stylistic Q572 and the Asus VivoTab TF810C.
So - given that I'd
like a large screen with as high resolution as I can, with decent CPU
and memory, I'd pretty much settled on the Samsung ATIV Tab 7 as
being the best feature/price compromise... but wait ...... !!!
Just as I thought it was safe .... I happened across this ...
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| The Wacom Cintiq Companion |
... and it was love at first sight. Any artist who uses graphics on a
PC knows Wacom as a manufacturer of PC graphics tablets, from the
budget Bamboo to the designer's standard Intuos. If you're into
design, you are also probably familiar with their Cintiq range of
touchscreens – external monitors you can plug into a graphics PC or
Mac which give you a write-on screen you can use with the whole
super-sensitive range of Intuos pens. Now – they say in response to
artists' and designers' not-so-subtle hints, they have released a
couple of stand-alone tablets with their 13.3” screen. One, the
Cintiq Companion Hybrid, operates as a normal Cintiq input device
when connected to your desktop graphics machine, and as an Android
tablet when on its own, with some sketchbook-type apps by Wacom
themselves for working on the fly. Sounds nice, but ...
The other model, the Cintiq Companion, is a whole new ballgame...
because it's a stand-alone Windows 8 tablet which will run things
like Photoshop, Zbrush, Maya etc... and my favourite ArtRage – and
has the fabulous Intuos pen with 2048 levels of sensitivity, tilt
function, and all the other specially-for-artists features of the
Cintiq range. Added to that, although the price is predictably quite high
(£1,650 – mind you, that's still £150 less than the FZ-G1), the
spec. is also higher than all the other tablets examined here. It's
the only one apart from the Panasonic monster with 8GB of memory as
standard, and 256GB of storage. It's the only one with
a core i7 CPU instead of core i5, and it has Wacom's standard
productivity devices (programmable physical and on-screen buttons)
designed specifically for artists. The point, basically, is that of
all the models compared, it's the ONLY one specifically designed for
creative visual artists, so the choice suddenly becomes quite simple.
I want one. Now.
