The Best Drawing Tablets for Beginners | Multimedia Kingdom

I have a very talented niece who could draw with gadgets she has with her. When I attended the product launch of Huion, I thought it was just another mobile but as I look over their products and how it was an affordable alternative to the usually expensive products related on digital drawing and animation, I was happy and at the same time amazed. Finally, I could get a tool perfect for my niece’s creativity Multimedia kingdom at Dhaka Bangladesh.

Who this is for

Ever try writing your signature with your mouse or a laptop trackpad? Yeah, it’s terrible. Imagine trying to create a detailed sketch or to precisely retouch a photo with those tools.

A drawing tablet, also known as a graphics tablet, lets you use a pen or stylus and translates your strokes from the tablet to your computer screen with an impressive degree of precision. It’s much more natural and comfortable to use than a mouse or touchpad, whether you want to paint, illustrate, animate in 3D, create a comic, or retouch photos.

This guide is for anyone making their first foray into creating digital art or retouching photos. A beginner drawing tablet is an accessory that you can attach to any computer and monitor, which makes it versatile and useful for years to come. If you’re interested in a graphics tablet but don’t want to spend a boatload of money on an accessory you might not use every day, our picks are for you.

How we tested

                  

The Huion model has a much smoother tablet surface than the Intuos; the pen glides in a way that feels more like drawing on a glossy iPad screen than on paper. Since there’s less friction, you shouldn’t need to replace the nibs as often. But if you prefer a traditional pencil-on-paper feeling rather than a slick drawing-on-a-screen feeling, this is something you’ll need to get used to.

The 1060Plus’s pen is the second-nicest we tested, right behind the Wacom Intuos Pro’s. It’s about the size of a Sharpie marker, with a smooth barrel at the top and a rubber grip at the bottom. This rechargeable pen is heavier than those that don’t require batteries, weighing a bit less than a AAA battery. It’s not uncomfortably heavy, though, and some people might even prefer the heft. Huion rates the pen’s battery life at 800 hours of continuous use after one hour of charging. We were unable to test this claim, but charging the pen with the included USB cable should be only an occasional inconvenience. Huion includes a pen cap and a stand that houses four nib replacements.

Based on our research, expert interviews, and testing, we found that the most important features for a drawing tablet (in order of importance) are:

• Pressure sensitivity: All of our experts agreed that the most important feature of a drawing tablet is pressure sensitivity. The higher the pressure sensitivity, the better you can control line weight (how thick and opaque lines are based on how hard you press down on the tablet with the pen). We found that 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity is plenty: Imagine trying to draw more than 2,000 distinctly different levels of gray with a pencil. Although some tablets below $100 offer higher levels of pressure sensitivity, you probably wouldn’t notice the difference. (We didn’t.)
• Driver stability, program compatibility, and input lag: Although “no one will explicitly ask about the quality of the driver software, they should,” DreamWorks TV’s Jim Mortensen said. “It’s super-important.” The driver affects how well the drawing tablet works with your computer, which software the tablet will work with, and the presence and severity of input lag. Lines should appear instantly.

• Resolution: The resolution determines how many lines you can draw per inch (lpi), which translates to how much detail you can draw in the tablet’s active area. The tablets we looked at were consistent—2,540 lpi for small tablets and 5,080 lpi for medium and large ones—so this wasn’t a distinguishing feature.
• Price: Graphics tablets aimed at beginners cost less than $100, while professional-level tablets with more advanced features can cost three to four times that amount. We focused on the sub-$100 range because extras such as multitouch and pen tilt recognition don’t make a huge difference in what you can create with a drawing tablet. As Victoria Ying advised, “[Approximately] 100 dollars is reasonable; you can upgrade as you move forward with your artwork.”
• Tablet size: Like choosing a monitor or a laptop, choosing a drawing tablet size depends on your preferences and needs. Small graphics tablets, such as the Wacom Intuos S, are about the size of a mousepad (with an active area around 6 by 4 inches) and highly portable. They can fit beside your keyboard and can function as a trackpad if the tablet supports multitouch—Carolyn Dickey mentioned that many designers use only their tablet and ditch their mouse completely. Medium (8-by-5-inch) and large (10-by-6-inch) drawing tablets are about as wide as a keyboard without a number pad, so they’re better suited for dedicated graphics work. The active area is where you draw, and it’s mapped exactly to your display. That means if you click on the bottom left of the tablet, for example, the cursor jumps to the bottom left of your screen. No matter what size your monitor is, when you move the pen on the tablet from the left edge to the right, the cursor moves from the leftmost edge of your screen to the rightmost edge—even if you have multiple displays. The smaller the active area, the less your hand must move to manipulate the cursor on the screen. This can mean less arm fatigue, but when you’re working on large (or multiple) displays you may need to zoom in to work with fine details or map the active area to a portion of the screen. If you’re used to making large strokes or you prefer to work full-screen on a monitor larger than 20 inches, a larger tablet might be for you.
• Pen type: Whether the pen is battery-free, rechargeable, or battery-powered changes only the heft of the pen and whether you need to worry about your pen’s battery life. Wacom’s pens are all battery-free, which means you never need to charge the pen or swap batteries, but other tablets’ pens require you to do those tasks. Pens that require batteries don’t have additional features but do have an added cost over the long run, and if you forget to recharge your pen, you have to wait an hour or more while it does so.
• Tablet buttons and customizability: Most drawing tablets let you map keyboard shortcuts and other actions to buttons on the pen and tablet. Some tablets let you map only the pen buttons to a few set of actions, while others offer over a dozen to choose from. More customizability means you can fine-tune your workflow, but most beginners don’t need more than a handful of buttons to cover the most-used shortcuts. Having easy-to-use software is more important than having 20 customizable buttons.
• Multitouch and tilt recognition: Two other features, multitouch and tilt recognition, distinguish tablets aimed at beginners from those for professionals. Multitouch lets you use your fingers on the tablet as you would a touchpad—for example, pinching to zoom or rotating artwork or 3D models. Tilt recognition lets you create different types of strokes based on the angle you hold the pen, offering a bit more creative control over your lines. But none of our experts thought these features were necessary for a beginner tablet, and they didn’t use these features themselves for their professional work. So although we took these added features into consideration, we gave them much less weight than more crucial functions.

Wacom is to graphics tablets (PDF) what Google is to search, and every expert we spoke to recommended Wacom tablets for their reliability. Testing the Intuos line was an obvious choice. We also decided to test models from up-and-comers such as Pablo, XP-Pen, and Huion based on positive reviews and their value: These tablets offer a larger active area, more shortcut keys, and in some cases built-in wireless connectivity for the same or lower price as their Wacom equivalents.

Compatible with Windows and Mac

It is completely compatible with both Windows and MAC; it can work with Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP/2000—so if you’re like me and haven’t upgraded to Windows 10 yet, you’re in luck. You can use this monitor with your computer still.

Adjustable Stand

The adjustable stand allows you to move the monitor around to get just the right position for drawing.

Cons

Stylus Pen is Picky

I found that the stylus pen’s drivers tended to freeze if I tried to customize the hardness or softness of the tip. Fortunately, I was able to work with the default setting, but not everyone will be able to do this. Also, you have to be careful with how much pressure you do put on the pen since it sometimes jumps to 100% pressure too easily.

Not Work With Paint Sai

if you use the Paint Sai program (I don’t usually—but I tried it out at the request of a friend) then you are out of luck. The monitor isn’t compatible with this program at this time.