Is the pen mighter than the mouse? Well in the world of image editing it sure the hell is.

by Patrick Roanhouse on 07/29/2009

Wacom's New Intuos 4 Medium Tablet

I have been a dabbler in the digital arts for a long time. Growing up I was always reading digital Photoshop WOW master books. I would draw comics and try to color them after scanning them in Adobe’s Photoshop. But I never could get just the right amount of flow control to get the shading right, never seeming to get just the right gradient. And I knew why, I didn’t have the touch only a pen tablet could give. Slowly over time my skills began to degrade. I gave up on the idea of doing comicbook art and just focused on my other main passion of information technology.

But that was before I started this blog and podcast. One of the perks of that is you can start to get stuff to review if you show a dedication to the craft. So it was my pleasure and honor that one of the first products I got to get as free product review unit was the new Intuos4 Medium Tablet from Wacom. All I could say was wow when I got it in the mail. First I was giddy, a wave of ideas flushed through my brain of all the stuff I could do with the Intous4.

Some of the first things I did was test out the pressure sensitivity. The new Intuos4 has 2048 pressure levels while the Intuos3 only had 1024 levels. Allowing the ease of those gradients I just couldn’t get in the past. One of the cooler features is the new LED side macro buttons and jog wheel. Using the Wacom preferences you can program them to any particular program you want to control it how you wish. So clicking the center of the new jog wheel you can select between 4 different settings and change them with an iPod like spin of the capacitive wheel. It was really helpful in when in photoshop I could select say brush size and gradually change the size or cycle through a color palette.

Right handed and left handed USB ports in the way?

The buttons below and above are also programmable in the Wacom Preferences. They can auto change depending on which application you have open. Updating their corresponding LED screen next to them. This was really helpful when wanting to quick select between blur, paint, bucket and other tools I use frequently in Photoshop. Or the different shape tools I use in Adobe illustrator. After presetting the macro buttons all it takes is switching between the apps, and it auto-magically changes to the current applications chosen macro button set. With all the nice new features of the Wacom Intuos 4 medium tablet, it does have two small issues.

First, it’s the placement of the USB ports on this device. In order to accommodate for left handed and right handed users there are two mini usb ports on the device on a single side of this device. With a flick of sliding switch on the bottom of the tablet you cover one and and reveal the other. Allowing for what would seem would be an easy switch over from left to right hand. But what I found annoying in it’s placement was that the cord when placed on my desk runs off the side of the desk and not the back. I’m a stickler for cable management being an IT guy by trade so It just a personal pet peeve. In a future model I would hope they might place one on all four size allowing easy switching of this pad to any orientation.

Second, the tablet is bundled with the three button Wacom tablet mouse. While the inclusion of a mouse to use on the surface area taken by the tablet is nice, the mouse it self is well, some what dated. It has only a left click, right click, and a single click-able scroll wheel that doesn’t tilt side to side. The scroll wheel pushing also feels more like pushing a boulder through mud compared to most other click wheel mice as well. Hopefully in future versions they will offer more modern examples of mice to include in the tablet package, or not include it at all and save themselves and the consumer a few dollars.

All in all I love using this tablet. It has greatly increased my ability to do very detailed photo retouches, as well as get me back into doing more digital art. The inclusion of the jog wheel alone has been quite helpful in everything from audio to video editing. In the final say on this product, it’s a solid evolution of the only line of pen tablet digitizers I will trust, Wacom’s.