Nothing screams designer one-upmanship than “my Wacom’s bigger than your Wacom”.
Frankly in the coming months I won’t be surprised to see young men walking around Shoreditch in East London, dressed like lumberjacks and sporting dubious facial hair, toting the new Wacom Cintiq 24 HD around the streets on their shoulders like a 1980s boom-box.
In fact, I might just join them.
The sheer size and quality of the 24inch screen is second to the utter bulk of the thing – at 30kg it is a monster that will dominate any desk space if it doesn’t break it – it is a product to inspire envy in all onlookers.
From our brief look, these are the pros and cons:
Pros:
– 1920×1200 resolution screen aimed at concept artists/designers/entertainments art workers
– Super good colours (lots of automotive industry interest) with 8bit display and 92% of Adobe’s RGB colour
– Its rather clever, with improved hard keys, plus extra pressure sensitivity – 2048, count’em, levels of pen pressure to be exact
– Nice body design that folds flat to table, flat down past table, and even has wee legs like a keyboard that can flap down for extra stability – plus upright at 90 degrees for presentations/normal screen stuff
– It’s a beauty; everyone else in the workplace will want it
Cons:
– £1,999… Ouch!
– Not 10bit, but it is 8bit
– Bit annoyed that it doesn’t have multi gesture/finger touch to make it the ultimate (although they’re working on that)
We’ll be proffering up a full Cintiq 24 HD review once Wacom find some delivery men hench enough to get one to our offices.
Also launched is the cute-as-Christmas Wacom Inkling: an ‘offline digital sketchpad’ device that lets you draw in ink using an adapted Wacom pen, that sends a signal to a receiver that clips onto your paper/pad (which can also be notified of different layers). The drawing is recorded and when the receiver is attached to your computer it puts up the image accurately with the individual layers, before exporting it into Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Autodesk Sketchbook, as well as a few others.
At £149.90, it’s a lovely little compact, rechargeable device that can be used on any type of paper (between sizes A7 – A4), and has 2Gb of storage.
It has a couple of downsides; a lack of alternative nibs (its only a ball point pen at the minute), and the pen is a bit clunky. However, most of the minuses are already being worked on, alongside a few bonuses such as a Quicktime player that can record your drawing stroke-for-stroke and play it back (for tutorials etc.).
We’ll have full Wacom reviews here soon.
