A long while ago I had a Wacom tablet that used a serial port to communicate to the computer. These days, finding a serial port is getting hard and finding a serial device driver is even harder. USB with its speedy communication speeds and standard interface provides so many benefits there’s no reason to keep dated hardware around. This was a shame, as my old Wacom is still in perfect working order — I just can’t use it on modern machines.
To solve this problem, I purchased a cheap tablet clone from the Computer Show months later. It worked well enough. However, the moment a new version of the OS rolled out, I found it stopped working. Nice.
So, for the longest while, I just did without.
That was until this last year when I had a number of artistic projects that could have benefited from a tablet, not to mention the cartooning business was picking up.
Talking with the wife, we decided it was time to invest in another tablet. And Jerry Carr convinced me I should really stick with the Wacom brand. Aside from having more features, high quality, great warranty, and good software, the chances of being hardware stranded again was risk acceptably low.
So, given that you now understand my past history with tablets, you can understand why I was willing to go all out for a final tablet. I never wanted to have to buy any more. So, when it came to which model, the answer was clear: the latest and greatest. When it came to which size, the answer was also clear: the biggest they got.
That’s how this kind of thing happens:
I seemed to have grossly under-estimated the fact that a 12″x19″ sized tablet would have a frame around it. It’s larger than my keyboard, larger than my screen, larger than my desktop space, and quite literally larger than me.
The thing comes with a dual ended pen, five spare tips of various textures, a five button wheel mouse, a driver disk (that needed OS X driver updates), and bundled software with coupons for cheap upgrades.