Wacom Intuos4 Medium. This one has a roughly A5 drawing area (although with widescreen ratio).
People asking me which size tablet to get might have noticed that I have always been a bit skeptical of getting a larger graphics tablet board. I have used the smallest Intuos3 (A6 size), and before that the equally small Graphire for many, many years without ever feeling cramped or having lacked precision. But when this larger tablet appeared on Ebay for half the prize it was hard to resist.
I will keep using my Intuos3 for travelling with my laptop.
To start off, it should be said that this is an extremely high quality product. Everything is top-notch quality-wise. The Intuos series is Wacom's professional range and there is a reason Wacom is the market leader. So it's a very good tablet, no surprise there. Also the Linux support is very good and is only getting better by the minute. However, since I had an Intuos3 (the previous generation of pro tablets) already before. I was interested in the actual differences to me.
Differences between the Intuos4M to my smaller Intuos3 (noticed so far):
- The Intuos4 is widescreen, which means it maps directly to my monitor. The Intuos3 was 4:3 which meant I had to remove a strip at the bottom of the tablet to match. Not a big effect actually, it didn't bother me before.
- More and better shortcut-buttons. The scroll-wheel is also a big improvement over the old strip. The buttons are also supposed to have LED images, but I've not set that up in Linux yet.
- Much better looking than the gray-ish Intuos3.
- Double the pressure sensitivity to the Intuos3. I'm not sure I can feel the difference, to be honest, but it's nice to know it's there.
- A slightly more coarse surface, for more paper-like feel. Again, I don't notice this much since I tape a plastic sheet over it anyway - I like my paint action fast and guaranteed not to hurt the surface.
- Not too fond of the cable placement. My desk would like it better if it was on the left like on the Intuos3.
- The larger area means I have to move my hand more. Will get some getting used to. Time will tell if this means higher precision, but I'm willing to bet no - this is what the zoom function is for anyway. There is a definite risk only a part of the tablet will see most of the action rather than me drawing on the full area.
- The larger area means I can actually use and fit french curves and rulers on the surface. Much more effective for drawing shapes and lines than using an in-program line-function once you get used to the particulars of eye-tablet-screen coordination.
To conclude, I will remain by my old recommendation for people to get the smallest tablets they can get rather than save up for a bigger one. I only got this one due to it actually being cheaper (used) than the smallest Intuos4. The larger surface is not of big importance since also small tablets have so high precision anyway - the only real advantage to me is an easier time using rulers. Plus of course the fact that I have two tablets and can keep the old, smaller one exclusively with the laptop now.
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Griatch