Wacom Bamboo Pen Tablet

Bamboo Pen offers a wide range of inspiring choices for personalizing everything you do on your computer. Take advantage of the quick, clear way to show people what you mean. All is with a stroke of a pen. With its ultra-slim design, Bamboo Pen has been specially created for both right and left-handed use – and it provides an integrated pen holder for convenient storage of its lightweight digital pen.But it’s not the technology that counts – it’s what you can do with it. Add your own distinctive personality to anything you do – with handwritten notes, sketches or doodles in emails, letters, pictures, presentations or other documents. Edit thoughts directly in documents. Enjoy fascinating ways of writing, painting and creating.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Great product
have had no issues so far, works great. i like the little red holder for the pen. it lets you keep the tablet and pen together. so no fear of losing the pen. i have had the product for a few months now.
5 Stars Affordable, portable tablet that gets the job done
I don’t use this in a professional capacity– just for precision image selection and occasional painting. I don’t think this would ever replace a mouse for me; there is a learning curve as well as a period of adjustment for that. It’s easy enough to have this and a mouse plugged in at the same time, and I have enough desk space to keep both, so I don’t have much motivation to make myself use this as my only point and click device.
This is a good starter tablet, as well as a small, inexpensive portable option for more advanced users. For professional use on a desktop, I think I would want a bigger one with more features. If you’re taking your laptop someplace, it’s very easy to put this in a sleeve and carry it along with you– and there is far less regret if it is lost, stolen or damaged. Since this is my first tablet in years, I can’t really compare the sensitivity to other tablets, but it seems to be a good medium for me– sensitive enough that I don’t have to press hard, but I don’t click on or select things by accident.
For writing and drawing, you’ll need to take your time. There is a bit of delay from your strokes to what’s on the screen, and if you’re not watching, you’ll get too far ahead not knowing what you just painted or wrote until a second or two later. When I tried using it instead of the mouse, pointing, clicking, and moving the cursor didn’t seem to have this delayed response. Just go a little slower when you’re writing & drawing, and you’ll be fine.
Get this tablet for amateur or occasional use, for travel or even playing with the kids… I don’t think I’d let a child run unsupervised with it if I wanted it to survive, but this is fun sitting with the kids, painting and coloring. Also, if you don’t know how you will like a tablet, this is a this is a good, inexpensive way to start. Once you use it for object selection and see how easy and accurate it is, you’ll never use a mouse for that again, and you will pick it up to experiment with more things. Five stars because it’s exactly what I needed at an affordable price.
5 Stars Wonderful tablet
This is the first graphics tablet I have owned, and so far I love it. I have done a lot of computer graphics work in the past, but it was all with a mouse. This tablet has allowed me to move from doing mostly vector work and other more simplistic forms of computer art to being able to do anything from sketching to painting as well. I spent $64 with shipping on this, which is far less than purchasing a sketchbook, quality paint sent, coloured pencil set and all the other items which this can emulate perfectly with the right software. Plus, with such a networked world, it is much easier to share digital paintings than classical ones.
I use Ubuntu 10.4 and therefore have not used any of the included software, so I cannot comment on its quality or usefulness. However, the software I use the tablet with in Ubuntu all works wonderfully with it. For those interested, I use a mix of Alchemy, GIMP, MyPaint and Inkscape for graphics work (all of these programs are free and run in Mac/Windows if you are interested. If ‘free’ makes you question their quality, you can find examples of what a talented artist can do with them here – [...], and Xournal for note taking or sketching in a notebook-like environment.
As it mentions in the product description, using the tablet feels a lot like using pencil/paper and can also feel like using paint brush/canvas depending on what you are doing. However, the change in feel is due to mental faculties; if you do not have an artistic mind, you might not experience it at all.
Adjusting to using the Bamboo pen tablet over a mouse was no issue for me. It all felt much more natural, and I was easily able to get into the swing of doing digital paintings and drawings and turned out a brilliant painting of a photo of my girlfriend and I with ease. I did not use any of the tutorials for such things, but I am not the type of person that requires them, so I cannot comment on their quality. I recommend keeping in mind that ‘tablet surface = screen,’ ‘hover = move cursor’ and ‘touch = left click.’ With those basics in mind, hopefully all the mechanics will just come naturally to you as well.
3 Stars Thought I would love it, but instead I only like it.
After looking for the right graphic tablet for my design/cartoon hobbies, I found this one for a great deal. I ordered it and it shipped very quickly. It installed easily and really worked great the first night but after the first week I noticed that every time I tried to draw a certain type of circle, the tablet thinks I’m trying to right-click somehow. I have not found a way to fix this, and have yet to finish my latest design with the tablet because of this problem. I am sure there is a way to fix it, but I cannot figure it out. That’s the only reason I rated this review as I did; if it weren’t for this one thing, this review would be all five stars. Oh but one other thing I regret: I wish I had bought the Bamboo Pen & Touch because I feel that it would have been more convenient. But overall this product rocks and I plan on enjoying it for many years to come.
4 Stars Some points.. (Windows XP)
This a great tablet for first time users like me. I mainly bought it to accompany my onenote 2007. My primary laptop’s operating system is XP (media center edition, not pro) and my MS Office is ver 2007. Unfortunately, XP has some limitations using Bamboo pen. It does not recognize it in MS word, MS Excel or PowerPoint (2007 ver), that is, there is no “inking feature”. I can still write and draw on onenote, but cannot convert handwriting to text. This is all due to OS Windows XP. My other laptop which has Windows 7 and MS office 2007, has no such problem. Everything works as it is supposed to.. With Onenote 2007, use it in the pen mode and not in mouse mode (Better control on what you are writing/drawing).I read somewhere that it works fine with mac operating sys also..
I have not yet installed the corel 4 software yet. I downloaded the free Artrage demo version and used it to sketch some stuff. It works great (just like when I switched from regular camera to a digital one, I took lot more pictures and hence learned a lot more about photography). Unlike the pen & touch, Bamboo pen does not have eraser at the back, so I configured the bottom button on the pen to be eraser. I didn’t buy pen and touch for two reasons.. 1) more expensive 2) Touch is not that great (slow to respond and not as smooth as mac touchpad). May be someday they will update the firmware or the next version will be better.
Wacom definitely need to mention the limitation with XP in their product description. There are some third party software to overcome this, but they are not free.. Wacom should have given some software for this issue.
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