Wacom Cintiq, any good?

[LARF]

Fancied one of these for a while. Does anyone use them in a professional environment, are they any good, what do you recommend?

Cheers
L

[Banners]

...and is a Cintiq worth getting rather than an Intuos or an Inkling?

(Been wanting one too!)

[Jim_Campbell]

Fancied one of these for a while. Does anyone use them in a professional environment, are they any good, what do you recommend?

As mentioned in posts passim, I didn't get on with the 12" one at all. PJ has one, I believe, and does just fine with it but, then, he is very small.

I traded up to a 21UX, which was just a night-and-day difference. Where the 12" felt like you were peering at a tiny portion of your document through a cramped window, the 21" was much more like working on a proper document.

I had very specific ergonomic issues with my desk layout and the stand design of the 21" (basically, you can't push the keyboard out of the way underneath it, meaning you have to have somewhere else entirely to put it, which I didn't have).

So... I flogged the 21" and got the 24HD, which is just lovely. You lose the ability to rotate the display (but you can assign one of the touchwheels to perform document rotation) but gain a bigger screen with a huge surround that's specifically designed to mimic sitting at a drafting table. There are lots of lovely features -- I particularly like the fact you can call up an overlay that shows you what you've programmed the Express Keys to do in the specific application you're working with (meaning that you don't have to try and stick to a single, standardised set across multiple software packages) and the ability to invoke an on-screen keyboard is of limited use, but a godsend for small amounts of typing.

For me, it was perfect, except that it seemed to be missing one obvious feature: multi-touch. It seemed so obvious in use that the missing part of the interface was the ability to draw with one hand and zoom, scroll, rotate with the other...

Of course, six months after I bought the 24HD, Wacom brought out the 24HD Touch which does exactly what I was looking for. However, weak as I am when it comes to making saving throws against The Shiny, the multi-touch version is a thousand fucking pounds more expensive than the regular 24HD, and I decided I could live without multi-touch!

But, yeah, totally worth it. I actually drive mine off my laptop, using the Cintiq as the main monitor with the laptop as a secondary screen:



In terms of ergonomics and workflow, this is pretty much the best set-up I've ever had.

Cheers!

Jim

[Jim_Campbell]

...and is a Cintiq worth getting rather than an Intuos or an Inkling?

(Been wanting one too!)

The consensus on the Inkling is that it really isn't very accurate so, unless you have some urgent need for your rough sketches to be inaccurately vectorised, you're better off with a moleskin and a scanner.

As far as the Intuos goes, the difference is as simple having to train yourself to deal with the hand-eye disconnect between tablet and screen with the Intuos and, well, not having to with the Cintiq. There's not really anything you can do with the Cintiq (in terms of actual features) that you can't do with the Intuos, except that you can pack the Intuos up in a bag and take it with you!

That said, it's hard to overstate how different the experience of drawing directly onto the screen differs from using a tablet.

Cheers

Jim

[DoomBot]

I have an intuos but I've been contemplating the 21ux for a while. The 24HD seems disproportionately huge by comparison. Is the 24hd functionally that much better than the 21ux?

[Professor Bear]

Short answer: yes.  Unless you are Jim Campbell and MADE OF GOLD AND MONEY and can spend that 1,700 quid you found down the back of the sofa on a super-huge one.

[Jim_Campbell]

Short answer: yes.  Unless you are Jim Campbell and MADE OF GOLD AND MONEY and can spend that 1,700 quid you found down the back of the sofa on a super-huge one.

Thing is, supply of the larger Cintiqs is so constrained that they REALLY hold their re-sale value, and I got my 24HD for a stupidly low price (thanks to Dylan Teague pointing it out to me)... and I had a good year for earnings in FY10/11 and was looking for a big fat deductible expense in that tax year.

Cheers

Jim

[Professor Bear]

I stole mine.

[blackmocco]

We all use them on Family Guy and I bought one for home. It really is a great tool. I love rough sketching on it and of course for color. Well worth the price except, as Jim says, there's nowhere for the keyboard to go with the stand in the way.

[CrazyFoxMachine]

Sigh....

I wish I had that kinda dough.

Thinking of trading in my A5 Bamboo for an Intuos though - although I've heard two differing opinions on that. One is that it's just a glorified Bamboo - the other is that it's a glorified bamboo and that that's an awesome thing.

[Darren Stephens]

Sigh....

I wish I had that kinda dough.

Thinking of trading in my A5 Bamboo for an Intuos though - although I've heard two differing opinions on that. One is that it's just a glorified Bamboo - the other is that it's a glorified bamboo and that that's an awesome thing.

Same here. I get my annual bonus next month and, although I won't have enough left for a Cintiq, I am considering upgrading to an Intuos large. Or get Photoshop. I can't decide. :/

[Banners]

Interesting stuff - thanks, Jim.

[radiator]

Mulling over getting a Cintiq - wanted one for years and finally in the position where I can afford one without feeling (too) guilty.

I gather that this thread may be a little out of date now - I see there's a few more options now.

There's the 22HD Touch, and also the Companion - which is the portable one.

The portable one sounds like a dream, though I imagine I'd have to shell out for a CC license as it's essentially a PC. I'm also unlikely to take it out of the house with me, so it's probably not worth the expense.

Can I run a 24HD off an iMac, and would it be possible (or wise) to get an extra long USB cable so I could theoretically doodle on it while sat on the sofa (where I tend to most of my drawing).

[HdE]

Oooh, Cintiqs...

I've had the 22HD for not quite a year now. It has literally changed the way I do a lot of things.

I will caution anyone looking to buy one, though - MAKE SURE your computer is up to the task of running one!

I got my 22HD at a reduced price by ordering it from Amaon when they had none in stock. The wait for it to arrive was agonising. When I finally got it, I unpacked it excitedly and found that it required a DVI input on my computer. Which I didn't have.

So, I spent £30 on a new graphics card (the best I could get, considering the foibles of my old work PC) and this ran the Cintiq... but with horrible pen lag issues, and frequent crashing as the PC kept trying to work out which of the two graphics cards it now had on board it was supposed ot use. One fo them being integrated, I couldn't actually do anything about this, in spite of attempting to convince the computer the old board was no longer present.

This meant I had a choice: send the Cintiq back, as its current performance ws unacceptable, or buy a new, faster PC. I opted for the latter, blowing another grand.

But it was worth doing. The Cintiq has some foibles, and you need to spend time using it to get the best from it - quite a lot of time, in my case. But it really is a superb bit of kit. I just wish I had more time to sit down and do stuff on it.

[Jim_Campbell]

Can I run a 24HD off an iMac, and would it be possible (or wise) to get an extra long USB cable

If my MacBook Air will drive one, you can certainly run a 24HD off your iMac, but the Cintiq requires two cables: USB for the tablet functions and HDMI or DVI for the video, so that would be two extra long cables. Depending on your aversion to electrical spaghetti, this might be an issue.

so I could theoretically doodle on it while sat on the sofa (where I tend to most of my drawing).

Haha. No. In this use case, the 24HD is definitely not the product for you — it's probably the least portable computer peripheral since the QMS 1660 laser printer, which was roughly the size and weight of a Mini Cooper. The thing weighs 60lbs — it needs a decent desk and it's going to stay where you put it. Also, although 24" isn't a particularly big screen nowadays, the surround is huge. This is a big piece of kit.

The whole thing is designed to evoke a fixed drawing board, and the weight is part of counterbalancing the adjustable monitor but — and if I had a serious criticism of the 24HD, it's this — the screen basically only has three positions: up (locked in place in a standard-ish monitor position); down (the screen's bottom edge resting on the desk/base of the unit, although there are extendible feet that allow for a slight adjustment); and flat (where the screen extends down past the desk edge, but also pivots to face up to you).

TBH, looking at the results people like Stephen Prestwood are getting out of theirs, for sketching I think you'd probably do as well with an iPad, a stylus and a decent art app, and get your sketches onto your main machine via Dropbox.

Cheers

Jim