A Tale of Two Tablets

Recently I got a bee in my bonnet about Photoshop and Illustrator, and I decided that I needed a drawing tablet. Being fairly frugal, and believing that Think Geek will never lie to me, I purchased a tablet that read like it would be everything that I might need. Unfortunately, it kinda didn’t.

When the package arrived I opened it excitedly. “Neato mosquito, a new toy!” I thought. Inside was the tablet, as advertised. When I plugged it all in and installed the software, however, it didn’t work with Photoshop, which was not advertised. The tablet would “click” like a mouse and was usable in all of my other programs BUT Photoshop, the one program that would be most effective with it. So I did what any rational person would do. I bought a different tablet.

In comes Wacom, pretty much the end all be all of tablet makers. I saw that the Bamboo was sold at a local electronics store, and went out and grabbed it. After a quick second of driver installation, I plugged this bad boy in and went to town, and luckily Photoshop doesn’t hate it. One of the most interesting things is the ability to erase. Just like a regular pencil, if you turn the stylus over it will act as an eraser on that tablet. Super cool.

In the last two days I’ve been really playing around with this thing. Here are a few of the drawings I’ve done (I’m a good tracer). Oh, and if anyone needs a day old used graphics tablet that works just fine (except in Photoshop CS4 on a Mac), I’d be more than happy to sell you one: