Bamboo Fun, the Large Lightweight Multi-touch Tablet
Artists can be finicky and demanding. They always want a comfortable pen, fancy brushes, expensive paper or paints- art supply stores are a great place to see your wallet drain quickly! We recommend turning any budding artists onto the wonder of digital art and design, as your furniture and pocketbook will be kept fairly safe. All you really need, beyond some expensive software and a decent computer, is a good tablet.
Wacom makes the best tablets in the business, and we enjoyed our last hands-on look at a couple of their models. They offer a wide line that offers something for everyone, and the latest update is the Bamboo Fun, which is their first to offer multi-touch support. It might sound like a small addition, but it’s the difference between Manet and Monet… or something like that. Perhaps we need more artists on staff.
Anyway, this is a not-quite-professional tablet that offers both a price point and a feature set above entry level but not quite at their high-end range. The included special pen is battery-free, and pretty decent, though it doesn’t offer quite the degree of freedom as their Intuos line- no pen tilting for instance, and fewer degrees of pressure detection, not to mention the lack of the neat mouse that comes with some Wacom tablets. This model is only available in one color- a sleek silver- and it comes with quite a bit of free software including Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter Essentials, and even a copy of the Nik Color Efex Pro which we recently took a look at (an odd addition, but valuable). We had no issues setting it up, bar some minor hassles on the Vista machine which we had used previously with the Intuos pad; uninstalling and reinstalling worked fine. One downside is that the tablet is wired, connected via USB, so you will be tethered to the computer.
The killer feature on the pad, and the one that should determine whether you get this one or a cheaper/more expensive model, is the multi-touch. If you’re used to the iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll quickly grasp the gestures necessary. There are nine in total, allowing scrolling, both left and right clicking, double clicking, and the all-important zoom and and rotate. They work about how you’d expect, but do vary between applications- not all software will work with all gestures! You can kind of use the tablet like a large touchpad, and generally our testers offered positive reports when doing so- imaging programs were easier to use and some operations a bit faster. A couple of testers, though, reported issues using the multi-touch functions, especially outside of imaging programs.
For a fairly large tablet, it comes in at a reasonable $170 or so- a great deal for a giant touchpad and a great tablet combined, and a great way to get those pesky artists away from your paints, walls, and furniture. Now, if we could just figure out what comes after Post-Modernism.
