I’m looking to buy a graphics display tablet, but I’m not ready to fork over 2000 - 3000 dollars for a Wacom cintiq. I don’t use my tablet enough to justify such a purchase, yet I would like to have something similar to practice my drawing, painting and sculpting.
So, recently I’ve been looking at Wacom Cintiq alternatives, but I’m not sure. Either the reviews are excellent, or they say not to waste your money. So I would like to hear from people hear that have such a cheaper graphics display tablet.
What brand/model did you get? Ar you satisfied or not? Why?
I know Wacom is the go-to brand, but as I said, I can’t justify spending that kind of money if I’m not using it often.
I have a Cintiq and a Yiynova MVP22U and I’d pick the Yiynova any day of the week. The pressure sensitivity is better, the parallax issues are much smaller, and the handheld hotkey stick is the greatest invention ever. All in a much cheaper package. The days where you “need” to blow a couple of paychecks on a Cintiq are gone for sure.
I have some limited experience with Cintiq 24 HD; they handed me one at the office to try if I like it. The idea of drawing on the screen is indeed very nice. How ever there is this lag when you do very fast strokes ,I just couldn’t work with the lag it was distracting and annoying. The 12 inch version was too small and 24 inch version was too big, literally you need a separate desk for that monitor. It is also very heavy and needs a good height adjustable chair. For all these reasons I wouldn’t recommend it. I stick with Intuos, it doesn’t have any lag, even the large Intuos are portable enough and everything fits into a normal desk.
Depends entirely on what you want to do with it and what you expect.
I have been working on a microsoft surface 2 for a year or so… and am perfectly happy. Just don’t expect it to do anything high end, but it’s portable and has a wacom pen (the later versions don’t).
Rebel Pixels has some good reviews on YouTube that focus on alternative drawing tablets and how they compare to wacom in terms of hardware quality as well as driver stability.
I have a Huion GT185HD, which is discontinued now. Apparently they ran out of 1080p panels so the new ones are much lower res.
It’s actually pretty dang cool. The pen is decent but not quite as nice as my Intuos. Parallax isn’t that great but you can experiment with calibration. It gets an awful lot of dust under the screen and there’s a couple funky pixels. The drivers are pretty decent once you mangle them into windows. It has hotkeys on the sides. Cables are kept out of the way.
I think other or newer Cintiq alts are better but this was 18.5" 1080p IPS for $500 last August(2015) that also happens to have a decent pen. For whatever flaws it never stopped me from working.
I have some Lenovo Thinkvision tablet. It’s not the best product out there, as it lacks eraser button support and is only 1600x900, but it was super cheap and can be easily packed with a laptop. I don’t use mine for art at the moment, but one of my more artsy friends was able to produce something he was happy with faster than with his low-end Wacom (not Cintiq). It’s only a good deal if you want the laptop size but don’t want to get a new laptop.
I have the Artisul D13 and I have to say I’m a pretty big fan of it. The drivers work well, which is one of the biggest problems of non Wacom tablets. I did have one strange driver crash, which uninstalling and reinstalling the driver fixed, but other than that it works flawlessly with Blender.
Most of the current alternatives will practically be the same, as they all use UCLogic digitizers. The only thing the brands are doing is picking a lcd panel to go along with UCLogic’s digitizer. So if you do pick an alternative, look more at the quality of the screen.
That said, I still recommend sticking to Wacom right now. While they are expensive, they have the best compatibility and a lot of the models retain their value if you ever choose to sell them again. If you cannot get new, you can find older models floating around, they are still very good. If you do go new, I recommend the 22hd, which is the most well rounded cintiq they have atm, bigger is not necessarily better, nor is smaller.
The wacom alternatives have some growing up to do, and at the end of the day they are still cheaper chinese knockoffs. I once bought a yinova and had to send it back because part of the cable was chewed on by one of their employees pets. You get what you pay for.
One more thing to note, if you do go with an alternative with a UClogic digitizer, then make sure you uninstall all wacom drivers. They do not like being on the same machine.
That’s fair. I have a Yiynova MSP19U+ V5 (the only V5 difference is the DVI output). Very few apps don’t work with it (Sketchbook; and I think I had screen mapping issues with Paint Tool Sai on my multi-monitor setup). I’ve had some driver issues, but only because it was conflicting with some other unnecessary background service running on Windows, which I had to track down and disable. All in all, it’s been a workhorse, but the driver stability and features have some room to mature.
If anyone is having the dual monitor issue whilst using their tablet I’ve found a relatively cheap solution for that problem. The program is called Lazy Nazumi Pro, works great for mapping the screen so you can utilize almost any open source software with your non Wacom tablet. I’ve used it with Blender, Inkscape and Gimp.
Typically a distro should support most tablets ootb, if it is broken mapping can be forced by: xsetwacom set “Wacom Graphire4 6x8 stylus” MapToOutput <your_monitor> aka DVI-1 etc.
If you have NVidia: xsetwacom set “Wacom Graphire4 6x8 stylus” MapToOutput HEAD-0 or HEAD-1 etc.
I also force my old wacom to match the ratio/dimensions and set buttons:
xsetwacom set “Wacom Graphire4 6x8 stylus” Area 0 0 16704 10440
xsetwacom set “Wacom Graphire4 6x8 stylus” Button 2 “3”
xsetwacom set “Wacom Graphire4 6x8 stylus” Button 3 “2”
Use the: xsetwacom --list devices to get your devicename.Put this simply in a bash script thats loaded at boottime.
Next time getting a new tablet i will try the Ugee M708 10x6". Wacom lost me cause they often drop drivers for no
good reason.
I bought now a XP-Pen Star 03 10*6" tablett for general use + a bit texture drawing for my Linux Mint 17.3.
Wanted to test something pretty cheap but big with no battery needed in the pen ( around 50 bucks ).
I made a few tweaks to adapt handling and enforce releability:
EDIT: made it more convenient now:
created a 52-uc-logic.conf where i set the Option “ButtonMapping” “1 3 2” aka static, no script needed at startup + this survives a sleep/resume, no need for extra actions though:
A question arose: the wacom-uclogic interference, could this be the reason i had problems with wakeup from sleep ?
Could you refer more detailed to the conflicts you found ? Am not sure i can verify this as is. At least my workaround works just fine.
EDIT: even better, i mapped now uc-logic tablet to wacom drivers to have more options. As a consequency you get back the known xsetwacom syntax + you get back threshold and pressure control ( not yet in evdev ).
Huion Kamvas and XP-Pen Artist are two well-known wacom cintiq alternatives.
I use an Artist 16 (2nd gen) from XP-Pen! The colors are realistic, parallax is minimal and the pen is accurate. I’m currently using it on my laptop and it works fantastic!
