Ok so I've used tablets for years but this is my first graphics tablet and honestly I really really love it.
I'd been wanting a graphics tablet for years but hadn't been able to afford one until recently, and with my regular tablet starting to break down I decided to take the plunge and get one. I chose this one after looking at quite a few options. I picked it because of the price point, what I'd heard about xp-pens customer service and quality, and also I don't have a large amount of desk space. the tablet's small enough for me while not being so small it'd be difficult to use my programs. Also…it's pink, which is one of my favourite colours.
ignore the sticker, I left the protective film on until my screen protector comes in cos wear and tear happens with pretty much every tablet, it's just easier to miss cos with regular tablets there's no screen or light coming through to highlight the scratches, so making sure you have screen protectors and changing them out when you need to is important.
I've included pics of the tablet program, and the customization options because that was my major worry. A lot of tablet programs and drivers are clunky, this one though is not. Frankly it's been one of the best ones I've dealt with over the years, super intuitive, and easy to use. It was easy to customize my hotkeys, and I can also save my hotkeys specific to each program which is SO NICE. I work in several different programs and tested this with affinity photo and affinity designer, as well as paint tool sai, Blender, and Krita, and all worked well. Being able to tailor the hotkeys for each program makes workflow a lot smoother.
Once I downloaded the driver, installed, and restarted, it didn't take long at all to get started at all. I work on a Windows 10 PC and when you first open it up the tablet mirrors your screen, and you can just get started working from there. However you can also set it up as a second monitor, which is what I did, by going into the display settings and hitting detect. Once it registers the tablet as a second monitor, you can change it from mirror mode to extended, which lets you have your program open on the tablet screen exclusively while freeing up your main monitor for things like internet, or in my case my refs are on my main screen so I can just look up when I draw. It makes life a lot easier. Keep in mind the second monitor setup is still active even though the tablet is turned off, just in case you're wondering where your mouse is.
Calibrating was really easy, I haven't had any issue with parallax but I also don't dot the pen straight down vertically. When calibrating I hold the pen the way I would when painting, and tap the crosshairs with the tablet at the angle I'd use to work. It has several automatic screen temperature options for the colours and one of them matches my screen almost perfectly so I didn't have to mess with calibrating the screen colours. However it does have rgb and brightness and contrast sliders for you do do this if you need to, which is super helpful.
For the physical connectors I have it plugged in with the HDMI USB cord it came with. I tried using it without plugging the second USB into a plug but there was some flickering because my laptop didn't have enough power to supply the screen consistently, which is normal, and I expected it cos I have a lot of peripherals plugged in to my PC. It's the same reason why you can't use a lot of USB hubs without an external power source or things start to fail. Your computer only has so much wattage to give, so I used the additional included extension cable and plugged it into an actual plug. After that it was fine and theres been no more flickering since.
All in all It's been pretty good, we'll see if I need to change my review in time but So far I'm pretty happy with it.
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