I want a Cintiq but im not giving up that much money. Are they gold trim? I think some other company could make a tablet for less just as good. we’ve had this technology for a long time its old and outdated. If I did not know how much they cost I would guess 200. US. I bet they make them for about 10 or 20 dollars each. and I cant even find a Wacom made plastic screen for 6x8 intous 3 back when the 4 was new. 80 dollars for a pen. Like everything the drivers are outdated befor you open the box and if you do not know better you go a year without the pressure working right.
Wacom may be the best but I hope they get some competition soon.
They are really proud of those things
I’m using 2 intuoses v3 in blender and I love them
IMO it is wrong to call the Cintiq a tablet. It’s an almost 100% AdobeRGB wide gamut display with a 2048 step pressure sensitivity in high resolutions. It’s quite a task to manufacture such a thing.
Comparing it to a tablet or a cheapass AMOLED or OLED touchscreen of a panel is just wrong 
Oh and it gets even more expensive because you need a computer connected to it as well. It’s “just a display”.
As for the price… yeh, Wacom is expensive, but they barely have returning customers, but nit because their stuff is bad, it’s because it’s not breaking. I got a Intuos 2. It’s over 10 years old.
The drivers are still up to date, it works with linux, the surface has no scratches from drawing, the pencil tip is still good, the 4D mouse’s buttons still have a good resistance. The only thing so far, I slipped off one of the rubberthingies under the tablet when pulling it on the desk because the glue lost his mojo. Nothing you can’t fix yourself.
So if you buy an Intous Touch 5 M today it’d cost you ~400 Euro.
If you use it every second day for the next 10 years, it’s ~1825 days, which totals at 10 Eurocent per day.
I’d say that is cheap for such a great device.
So yeh, basically you’re right that they cost a lot more than they had to, but the company has to make profit in order to keep operating and R&D and a decent quality has it’s price too. If you sum it up, you get quite a pricetag, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth that to you.
If you use the tablet twice a month and only for 2 years, you’re better off buying some cheapass product.
Its only one tool. You need a computer , video card, software, the tablet, internet connection and more You cant look at it price per day only rich people can do that.
It would be easy for another company to make a cintiq tablet for a few hundred dollars. It is just to much money. They have no competition
I like my tablet I like it alot but the cintiq is as I said old technology and another company should be able to make a good one for about 200 US. If it was not so much money most people here would have one. If they want to build something new and charge alot that’s fine but it is old why are they still so much money .wacom need some competition .
As for the price of the intous It is not so bad a little high but
I agree with Arexma, it’s not a tablet. Also, there’s a difference in consumer and professional stüff, like a monitor. You can buy a 24" TN-equipped LED flatscreen for <$200 but the IPS ones I use are $500+ and they are still pretty crappy compared to the $2.000 ones from Lacie & alike…
An an example, the IPS panels are one reason the MacBook Pro’s are as expensive as they are… (that and the Apple-logo, hehe) ;D
I think it’s sorta funny how much digital artists complain about having to pay for tools. I guess it’s easy to get spoiled with awesome free software like Blender and cracks on torrent, but lets be real: If you were making a sculpture in the real world, you would have to BUY your clay and BUY your Clay Tools, and BUY your plaster and BUY your silicon mold material and BUY your bronze and BUY your welding gear, etc etc etc.
It’s very simple:
Hardware costs money.
People don’t produce hardware to sell without a healthy profit motive.
Why on earth would they set up a huge international business to sell tablets at cost?
I’m sorry but “only rich people do that” about calculating cost per day is utter BS.
Professionals on budgets count the cost per day.
People who realize if they tuck away $2 a day instead of buying coffee can buy Zbrush at the end of the year.
Sorry, but only entitled kids who think everything should just be given to them, AND rich people don’t think about the cost per day.
and I’ve got a 13 year old Wacom Graphire that cost about $100 in 1999. When I bought it as a student it was a somewhat large expense for a tool, but I guess it’s ended up only costing me about 2 cents a day. Boy was that tablet one of the best values I’ve ever purchased.
All that said, I can’t afford a Cintq cuz I don’t have the capital to lay out for it. But once my next project has some backers, I’m definitely sporting for one.
That’s the only way to look at it, that’s how someone manages finances and/or runs a buisiness.
If you need, in this particular example a Cintiq, you got to figure out, how often do you need it, how long do I use it, how much will it speed up your working process, how much money will it save me and how long till it payed for itself and starts to work for me generating revenue. And if you’re poor and need it for your work, you got to take a loan, that’s how you start a buisiness.
If you want one, like it seems you do, it’s luxury and if you’re rich you just pay the price and if you can’t afford it you look for something to blame why you can’t have one.
You’re just throwing in random numbers without any backing up data. A cheap! IPS wide gamut display alone costs ~650USD.
Please tell me again how you think it should be doable for 200 USD?
True, someone might be able to make a cheap version, but do you want a cheapass china version of it with a TN panel with 64 pressure levels and a casing full off PPA and lead but still cracking on more than 10°C temperature difference and a pen with a cable and a driver that mostly doesn’t work, is in chinenglish and no linux support?
I guess there’s no market for such a thing, else you could buy it on ebay already. 
I want a Cintique too, but I cant justify the expense and my Intuos does the job. But I am not blaming Wacom for its high price, nor the lack of competition.
And there is competition, like the LG Pentouch Multiboard, or the SMART Podium.
And for pure Artpads there’s Aiptek, Genius, Hanvon, Perix, Trust, Apple, Axdia, Manhatten, Speedlink and Sweex I know about.
So, the options you have is to complain on the internet that Wacom are highwayman ripping off poor travelers, or you cut short something else and put money aside to save up to afford luxury.
If you really need it, you surely have a economic interest in it and figure out how to get one, either man up and start a business with the mandatory loan, or you convince someone to sponsor you for whatever reasons.
So there’s competition, good driver support even for old devices for windows and linux, long durability rather than planned obsolecense, a “reasonable” price and a generally good reputation…
I dont think that it is so much. Have:
Wacom Intuos 4 Wireless
Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch Small
Wacom Inkling
Was not so expensive, but dont need the 2 tablets anymore ^^
Also the new Intuos 5 seems to cost less than Intuos 4.
What I could need but is too mch is 3dconnexion - they should lower the prices
Hi,I have the Wacom Bamboo, since getting it, I use it for everything, not dragging a brick around my desktop is great. The UBer Wacom would be nice but for my purposes (photo editing mostly) the Bamboo is fine.
You can have my stylus when you pry it our of my cold dead fingers.
Also the new intuos 5 is very great with the wireless kit =)
cintiq where i tested all versions gets warm and is too big for most purposes
inkling is great for mobile sketching and shold be tried =)
cintiq is old and out dated.
Arexma nobody adds price per day . That,s just nuts. Its a sales tactic for the simple so people do not notice the real price " only pennies a day " nobody here has a cintiq because they are to much. Can you think of everything you are going to need every day? I’m “throwing around numbers” . That’s a stupid thing to say. I know how much things cost.
Sono You assume to much.
farmfield I got my monitors from a yard sale and they are fine.
There is no competition for this product and that is why it is so much money.
It’s no big deal. It was just a thought I had when my pen dragged over the groves.
Uhm, yes? That’s how everyone with half a brain runs a buisness in this world, how it’s tought in buisness classes. You have to know what you’re going to need and what the estimated utilization will be… well, you’re most likely rather young and haven’t spend much thought on that.
Obviously not, how else would you explain your statement to build something for 200$ of which the main part would cost 600$+?
Quite a business plan you got there 
I listed you the competitors and even told you why there isn’t more competition.
sigh
You say Arexma is throwing out numbers, he’s speculating. Well, perhaps, but so do you. You think some other company could do it cheaper. But you don’t know.
But, yes, in general it is true, you can in most cases do stuff cheaper - but they will also not be as good. And the market for a product as a ‘Cintiq’ most probably is what it is, else some chinese company would have started making copy’s of the ‘Cintiq’ a long time ago…
I think. I presume. I guess. As do we all. ;D
cintiq and old and outdated? xD
The product is designed for and aimed at professionals in a production enviroment. They can sell it at that price because to a professional its advantages make the price tag irrelevant. If your really that mad that a great product is not in your price range then I offer you a great alternative, pencil and paper. Essentially your buying a monitor to reproduce the true feeling of eye to hand to art source.
then I would also recommend the new Inkling =)
digitalizes your drawings directly
There is no competition because every technology needed to make a tablet as good as a wacom is patented by wacom.
Anyway, I don’t think competition would drop the price of a cintiq. As mentioned before, a large and good monitor is already very expensive. Not to mention the fact that this is no regular touchscreen. It’s all driven by precise and complex electromagnetic resonance technology. You hardly see some devices with electronic in it working without any batteries else than your wacom’s pen. I don’t think they make a huge profit out of the cintiqs.
Not to mention that it is designed for a professional use and so it’s has been designed to work like 8 hours a day 5 days a week during years.
So yeah, Cintiq is quite expensive, but that is the only negative point you can put on it. The device itself is perfect, drivers are good, and it last forever. Even if some companies would make a similar device with a lower price, I’d stay with wacom 
I’m not sure all chinese manufacturers care about that, but you make one of the better points so far in this discussion. ;D
Edit,
I, who done graphics in general for quite some time now, I actually never used a tablet. I tried to, many times, but I just can’t get my body to get used to it, the idea of it. Pretty weird I guess, hehe, but I manage… (Probably easier with a Cintiq though, I only tested the ‘normal’ Vacom tablets)
One thing that I’ve never really got about “PC’S” is that they don’t really off load work to other hardware subsystems in the way Mini and mainframes do. I guess its partially about price and partially about the fact that it can get away with being a fairly simple system.
I once had an idea for linking a USB displaylink touch display with a beagle or pandaboard, so the display would be its own computer which when connected to a PC, via a usb-otg, would become both a display and an input device yet still be an entirely independent computer subsystem in its own rights.
The advantage would be that the PC could map a large (adjustable size, say based on the size of a photo to be edited) display onto the device, and the device would then allow its physical display to map a part of this larger display and would then be independently capable of zooming and scrolling within this larger display and would calculate any touches back onto the larger mapped display coordinates.
Obviously with mass production and specialized fabrication the cost of some parts would be fairly small (like not needing displaylink, instead directly driving the display) and the main PCB having far fewer parts than the pandaboard due to being more specialised and removing everything not required from the board.
The biggest costs would be the display and touch screen, and these are unlikely to be reducible costs if colour and accuracy are required.
Taking it a step further if you also included USB and Sata on the PCB you could build a portable backup and photo editor for a camera, with 2 versions… user and pro, both identical except cost due to one having a cheaper screen the other a beautiful large gamut screen.
Oh thinking about it, thats a tablet, lol, but more useful as it becomes a visual feedback touchpad to a computer.
I’m guessing a cheap model could be made for about 75-150 USD.
With some re-working of the USB software side (introduce a virtual subsystem within a usb to usb-otg connection) it would then be possible for both the pc and the pad to be able to share resources, so the HD of the tablet would be accessable to the pc, and the reverse… as would any other device in, or attached to, either machine.
Seeing as how this is a blender forum, you could edit with the pad, and when you hit render it would then off load the work to the pc or even distribute the workload between them.