Just last month, Xencelabs announced a new "industry first" $1,249 4K OLED Pen Display targeted at professional digital creatives requiring quality and portability. The tablet has compelling features and big ambitions. Can it live up to these lofty goals?
Xencelabs announced the new Pen Display 16. Available on its own for $999 or as part of a bundle for $1,249, the new ultra-slim and lightweight 4K OLED pen display promises to provide vibrant color, precise pen performance, and exceptional portability.
Since using my first pen tablet over a decade ago, I found that working with display tablets provided an extra level of precision to my work since I could see exactly where my pen strokes were connecting on the screen. This let me be more precise and creative with my edits, but most of these tablets were either incredibly expensive or overly large. The $1,099 Huion Kamvas Pro 19 solves both these problems.
I think one of my favorite things about the current state of the display tablet industry is how there seems to be a non-stop growth of affordable alternatives to the historic "major players" in the game, making it easier and much more justifiable for photographers to make the leap into not just using a pen tablet, but a large and color accurate display version suitable for proper photo editing.
There's no denying that in the last few years, we've seen a veritable explosion of pen and display tablets from competing companies. At this stage in the competitive game, the hardest part for creatives has been figuring out what makes one tablet better or different than another at each budget level.
Wacom has announced four new Wacom One brand tablets designed for beginning artists seeking an affordable and portable pen tablet or display tablet solution for their creative work.
At this point in the "Tablet Debate", the argument about who makes the best tablets for photographers will shift back and forth between Xencelabs and Wacom depending on who you talk too and what deep-down preferences they have. While Wacom may have reigned supreme for a very long time, it's hard to deny that with the launch of the $1,899 Pen Display 24 Studio Series, Xencelabs has officially given Wacom a reason to worry.
Wacom's Cintiq Pro 27 might be expensive, but it is one of the most immersive, accurate, and stable display tablets ever.
There are now tons of pen tablet makers out there and the options have given new users far more power to choose from a wide variety of styles, features, and obviously prices. The new $40 Veikk Voila L gives beginners an impressively competent "bare-bones" pen tablet to learn on for scant little investment.
Anyone who has spent any extended time editing photos with a mouse will find that often, it's just not the best experience. That's why so many editors switch to a drawing tablet (also known as a pen tablet), but picking the best one has gotten surprisingly challenging in recent years.
The $199 Huion Inspiroy Giano is one of the largest Bluetooth 5.0 pen tablets currently available, and it has a drawing surface area of 13.6 by 8.5 inches (16 inches diagonally) making it an ideal tablet for creatives who need a larger area to work with while retouching or digitally painting on larger 4K and 8K displays.
Huion says its new $160 Inspiroy Dial 2 (Q630M) pen tablet is designed to enhance and improve every feature from the previous tablet and "boost efficiency of creatives to the next level." I think the company achieved that goal.
Huoin has announced the successor to the Inspiroy Dial Q620M: the Inspiroy Dial 2. The company says the new drawing tablet not only optimizes the design but also adds a second dial that it claims helps further improve productivity.
As displays have become better and cheaper to manufacture over the past several years, high-quality pen displays have slowly been edging out pen tablets as the best way to edit your photos. One of the companies making a major push in this space is Huion, and over the past couple of months we've had the chance to go hands-on with the company's brand new, color-accurate Kamvas Pro 16 (2.5K) -- one of the most compelling options for any photographer looking for a high-quality pen display at a reasonable price.
Huion has launched the Kamvas Pro 2.5K series, a 2.5K resolution pen display tablet is available in 13-inch and 16-inch size configurations. The company says this is the first time a pen display of these sizes has been offered in this resolution.
XP-Pen's new Artist Pro 16 is one of the most compelling entry-level graphics displays on the market. It's lightweight, well-built, highly customizable, color-accurate, and all for a price that will make Wacom owners blush. It's not a perfect product, but no other Full HD pen display on the market offers this kind of experience and build quality for just $450.
During today's Microsoft 2021 Surface Event, the company has announced the new Microsoft Surface Pro 8 two-in-one tablet laptop, designed for powerful workflows and is seamlessly paired with the new Surface Slim Pen 2.
Xencelabs has announced the Pen Tablet Small that joins the Medium as the company expands its product line.
If you own an iPad and an Apple Pencil, there are several ways to pair them with your computer and transform them into a high-quality drawing tablet for photo editing. There's Apple's own Sidecar feature, the popular app Astropad, the hardware-assisted option Luna Display, and the "made by ex-Apple engineers" Duet Pro. I wanted to see which of these options offers the most features and the best experience for the photographer on the go.
What do you get when you take a bunch of former Wacom employees, start a new company, and give them carte blanche to develop a brand new pen tablet? What you get is Xencelabs, a new player in graphics that is bringing some much-needed innovation to a stale market. This is no cheap knock-off we're talking about, Xencelabs' new Pen Tablet Medium just put Wacom on notice.
With the release of the Wacom One in 2020, Wacom lowered the barrier to entry into the world of pen displays and inadvertently created an ideal product for photographers. Where other pen displays in the Wacom lineup are either too big or too expensive, the Wacom One makes a great case for trading in your Intuos Pro for a more intimate photo editing experience.
Newcomer Xencelabs has announced a new pen tablet that aims to meld affordable pricing and excellent user experience into one device. The Xencelabs tablet is devoid of unnecessary buttons but gives the option to add-on a multi-function remote accessory with 40 customizable shortcuts per application.
When it comes time to up their photo editing game, most photographers reach for a pen tablet like Wacom's Intuos Pro series. But what about pen displays? Wacom, XP-Pen, and Huion all offer displays that let you draw and edit right on the screen without sacrificing any of the features you get from a tablet. They're typically used by artists, but we wanted to know: are they worth it for photo editing?
Ask any retoucher what one item they couldn't live without, and they will probably point to their photo editing tablet. Swapping your mouse for a pen tablet can make a huge difference for your workflow, but is it really worth spending $380 on the Wacom Intuos Pro that everyone seems to be using? Are there any affordable alternatives? I'm glad you asked!
Yesterday, pen tablet maker Wacom revealed the Cintiq 22: a large new addition to the brand's more affordable non-Pro Cintiq lineup that might just put a 22-inch pen display in reach of budding and budget-conscious photographers.
Apple's new Macbook features a redesigned pressure-sensitive trackpad called the Force Touch. In addition to being more powerful for inputs from your fingers, the new design allows for the use of a stylus on the touchpad if you'd like to retouch your photographs tablet-style.
Inklet by Ten One Design is the first 3rd party application for Mac that offers this.