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Tablet buyers guide

Anthony Fordham- 23/09/2009 12:32:46

Tags: Anthony Fordham, buyers guide, graphics tablet, tablet

Tablets were once the exclusive of professional visual artists, but they now bring the power of a touch interface to just about everything you do on a computer.

Way back in the 19th Century, the typewriter was invented to massively increase the speed at which people could write. And in the 50s and 60s, new input methods were developed to meet the needs of a new generation of computer users.

Yes, the keyboard and the mouse is a wonderful way of getting ideas out of your head and into your computer, but there's still one group that needs more: visual artists.

Ever tried signing your name in MS Paint using a mouse? It's a pretty painful experience. Now imagine trying to create an amazing piece of artwork, or virtually cut out an image for a magazine layout, or even select individual pixels when touching up a photo - awful!

Fortunately there is a kind of input device that marries the ancient immediacy of pen and paper with the power and flexibility of your computer.

Typically, it's called a graphics tablet, because traditionally this kind of device was used by artists and desktop publishing professionals. Today though, there's a whole new generation of products aimed at more casual - but no less creative - users.

Sensitive types

First though, the basics. A tablet is most like the touchpad on a notebook computer. It's a touch-sensitive surface, but unlike a touchpad, tablets range from notepad to sketchbook size. And at the high end, you can get tablets as large as A4 or even A3.

A standard tablet doesn't respond to direct fingertip touch. Instead, it uses a special pen to register input. This is important, because the key element of tablet control is pressure sensitivity.

As an artist working with pencil or charcoal varies areas of light and shade by pressing harder or softer, so too the tablet can transmit a pressure reading to painting and illustration software, resulting in varying thicknesses of line.

The first generation of tablets could detect a couple of hundred different pressure levels, but today's models can detect more than 2000. Combine this with software than can simulate everything from blobs of paint clumping individual bristles on a virtual paintbrush, to the texture of the digital paper or canvas being worked on, and you have an enormously powerful creative tool.

Touch for all of us

An enormously expensive creative tool too, at least until recently. Tablets were indeed once the domain of the graphics professional, starting at several hundred dollars for a small unit all the way up to many thousands for something incorporating an LCD screen under the touch surface.

Today's tablet manufacturers, though, offer a full range of devices, including a whole bunch aimed at the keen amateur. Yes, they're still more expensive than a basic mouse, but the latest units incorporate a second sensor system - one that responds to fingertip touch as well as the pen.

This makes a modern tablet even more versatile. You can use it like a touchpad, and 'multi-touch' controls allow you to use different finger gestures - single-finger flip, double-finger drag etc - to perform tasks such as rotating an image. A pinching gesture zooms images in and out.

Indeed, you may have seen these gesture controls on touchscreen PCs or certain MP3 players and mobile phones. The tablet, however, is a much bigger surface, and working with large photos on a PC is more natural.

Plus you can snatch up the pen and squiggle on captions, or apply visual effects, or even zoom in to correct individual pixels with delicate dabs of the pen - perfect for photo retouching and editing.

Tablets aren't just useful for visual art either. Everything from large spreadsheets, to long word documents to simply browsing the internet or the images in favourite photo viewer can be quicker and feel more natural when using a tablet.

Page 1 of 2  Next - Tablets: what you need, and what you can do  

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In this article

• Tablet buyers guide
• Tablets: what you need, and what you can do

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