Full Review of Wacom Intuos3
I’ve been using this graphics tablet for over two weeks now. At first it takes some getting used to. Every point on the tablet corresponds to a place on the screen, which is completely different from a mouse. With a mouse, you can pick it up, place it in a different location and continue as normal. With a tablet, you just have to move. It took me four hours of wanting to throw this thing out the window to realize that I absolutely love it.
Issues.
I’ve fully transitioned to using the tablet as my primary pointing device though. There are times it responds slow when I am using program(s) that are fairly intensive (such as browsing the web with 5 tabs open, installing some software, and rendering a movie in the background). During these times, since I am using this on a laptop, I just use the little touch pad.
Drawing.
I am impressed with the pressure sensitivity that this thing has. I’ve been using it with a fairly cheap (compared to everything else) program called Smoothdraw (which runs at $45 as a download with a nice free trial by the way too) and it has performed admirably. I can achieve almost perfect pencil effects with the Intuous3.
Price.
Okay, I analyze things to death and initially, I don’t think think I could have justified paying almost $300 for this piece of plastic that sets on my desk and I only use for graphics every now and then. But after using it and getting through those initial four hours of frustration, I use it almost constantly now. It begs to be drawn on. As for the price, well think about it this way:
How much do you spend on paper, illustration board, canvases, prismacolor pencils, watercolors, acrylics, sketch journals each year?
See what I mean, I think I just saved myself around $600 I normally would spend elsewhere to get my sketching fix for the year (I’m the one who always buys tons of sketch journals and pilot v5 pens). Now, since I take my laptop with me about everywhere anyway as a professional blogger, I just bring my tablet along too. It’s about the size of a larger sketch book, but with endless possibilities.
The above review was for Amazon.com when they contacted me about reviewing it on their site. Then I realized that I only could write 300 characters there. Then I figured out that it would be good to publish here because "hey, Amazon doesn’t pay me to write for them!"
Enjoy.
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POSTED IN: Digital Art, Media & Ideas
1 opinion for Full Review of Wacom Intuos3
Cozmo
Oct 10, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Thanks for the review. I’m still using a really old Wacom tablet (serial!) which only has a single button on it, and is being threatened to become completely obsolete as serial ports vanish from computers.
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