The product being reviewed is WACOM’s Intuos 9x12 serial tablet with stylus and mouse. (Bear in mind that this only the active area. The overall tablet size is 14x18".) And let me say right from the start, drawing with a pen gives your artwork a much better look with a much smoother stroke and far greater control over your instruments. If you plan to become a graphic artist, give serious thought to acquiring a pen-tablet. You won’t regret it.

Attach the unit before booting the computer and Win98 recognizes the presence of the tablet during its hardware initialization sequence. You can even have more than one tablet connected at the same time. After installing the included drivers (doesn’t require a reboot), applications that understand the "wintab" programming interface can begin using the added functionality right away. The Intuos drivers do not interfere with any special mouse drivers that may be currently installed.

The "pick up and roll" handling of the stylus is still as difficult as the AIPTEK unit – the stylus must be raised about an inch before the tablet no longer senses it (the operating manual claims a quarter inch). The pen-tablet works in a DOS-based window but not in a full-screen DOS environment, Windows’ Safe Mode, nor when the Task Manager window is activated.

The stylus gives three additional dimensions: pressure (z-force), and x- and y-tilt from vertical. (The software includes a Virtual Airbrush plug-in for PhotoShop.) It also has an eraser function activated by another nib (pressure-sensitive tip) located at the eraser end of the stylus. The 4D mouse has an additional dimension: rotation. It also includes a thumbwheel for scrolling functions. Each and every button on the stylus and 4D mouse can be programmed individually or in concert (chorded) with other buttons.

The tablet (or, rather the control panel) can be programmed for any number of devices set to any specific behavior. For example, in your sophisticated graphics application, you may wish to have one stylus configured as a 5-pixel wide brush with green paint and a "soft" feel, while another stylus is configured as a 1-pixel wide pen with transparent ink.

The tablet has a control strip at the top that, when the pen or mouse touches it, a button with a corresponding number on it pops up on the desktop. These pop-up buttons simulate keystroke sequences (or keyboard shortcuts) and by default, are those of common application functions such as Open, New, Print, etc. Each button can be re-programmed with any other keystroke sequence. (For example, Word 97 can accept ALT, then f, then o to open a document. Acrobat Reader 3 must take ALT and f at the same time, then o to open a document.) Each installed application can have its own individually customized control strip function set.

Click the thumbnail for screenshot. (88K)

Bundled applications include MetaCreation’s Painter 5 Classic (now owned by Corel), numerous PhotoShop plug-ins designed to enable the pen-tablet, and Sensiva, a utility that triggers programmable events when large letters are drawn on the screen (e.g., a large W will start MS Word). Painter Classic will only understand PhotoShop 3.0 plug-ins.

The mouse cursor was very jumpy (jittery, like having the DT’s). Fortunately, while reading the User’s Manual (very well written, by the way), I came across a troubleshooting tip that suggested how to fix this. Essentially, a noisy monitor (and this particular monitor generates a lot of radio frequency noise) will interfere with the tablet’s reading of its hand controllers. Either: get a better monitor, change the video card’s display settings to a lower resolution or refresh rate, move the tablet away from the monitor (the monitor is set on a swing-arm pedestal and the tablet is directly underneath it), or try setting the tablet to use a different sense frequency (with some minor loss of functionality). The AIPTEK unit didn’t suffer from this problem, but then, the WACOM product is much more sophisticated.

Tablets come in various sizes. Their usual dimensions take a 4x3 ratio, the same ratio as computer monitors and televisions. The implication is that a tablet could replace your mouse. In several specialized instances, it should. But WACOM makes the argument that a tablet could permanently replace your mouse and after a few hours of hand-eye coordination exercises, they think you might end up agreeing, especially when the stylus is set to pen mode as opposed to mouse mode. In pen mode, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the active area of the tablet and the total desktop area (which, by the way, the relationship is totally configurable). In mouse mode, the cursor tracks the pen from where it was last positioned.

After a few dozen games of FreeCell, I would, to no small degree, have to concur. Moving a stylus across a tablet is much closer to simply tapping your finger where you want the cursor to be than using a mouse. I can see where it would be real easy to adapt to having a tablet control your computer.

Well, a 9x12" tablet (actually, width is usually expressed before height, so the tablet is 12x9") is much too large to use for everything there is to do. The main purpose of a tablet so large is to provide precision for graphics applications being displayed on extremely high-resolution, large-sized monitors. If the computer user really thinks that a tablet is the way to go, then a 6x4.5" would be much more convenient. And recall that this is only the active pad area. The overall area of the device is still much larger than the typical mouse pad.

In my particular situation, my laptop has a touchpad of 2.5x1.75" in size and I am quite used to it. When comparing a touchpad to a tablet, however, the defining difference is three-fold. The first is the far greater resolution offered by using a fine-tipped nib vs. a relatively fat fingertip. The second is the third dimension – pen pressure. But the third is the relatively high distance I must raise the pen or mouse to reposition the device. This may be an insurmountable obstacle.

WACOM Intuos pen-tablet
$430 ($329 refurbished) WACOM price
Street prices range from $269 (www.solias.com) to $660.
Additional accessories and controller types are available.
WACOM
1311 SE Cardinal Court
Vancouver, WA 98683
1-800-922-6613