Not Your Usual Desk Rodent
Written: Oct 26 '01 (Updated Mar 19 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cheap, flexible, and very capable.
Cons: Low sampling resolution, DOS performance.
The Bottom Line: If you want a capable little tablet without paying an arm and a leg, this Graphire's for you.
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| zero_'s Full Review: Wacom Graphire Pen & Mouse Set |
Take your mouse, open the art package of your choice, and sign your name. You can't, can you? Try drawing a human face. Unless you're some kind of rodent jockey, that high tech optical mouse with the 27 buttons is starting to look pretty clumsy now, isn't it?
For the artistically inclined, graphics tablets have been around for ages. The problem is that they are traditionally mind numbingly expensive. Not anymore. Coming in at just under 99 dollars, the Wacom Graphire tablet opens the door for any schmuck like me to play with a professional imaging tool. It's loads of fun, too.
The Graphire comes in the traditional opaque gray, as well as I-Macish shades of transparent green, blue, and red. The set includes the tablet itself, which acts as your mousepad, a pen, and a mouse. Only the tablet has a wire coming off of it. Everything else is completely wireless. Nothing in the set needs batteries, either. The tablet hooks up to your USB port, so you'll need to have one of those free, and you'll also need a USB capable operating system. Windows 95 and NT 4 users need not apply, I'm afraid.
The concept of graphics tablets is simple enough. You have a little slab of plastic on which you write with a pen. Unlike a mouse, you can hold the pen naturally and use it for writing or drawing or what have you. With the Graphire you can do things a normal mouse can't, too. For example, it's pressure sensitive. Press harder and you'll draw a darker line.
Performancewise, the Graphire does fairly well. There is a little rocker switch on the side of the pen that behaves as the right mouse button when you press it one way and does an automatic double click if you rock it the other way. Pressing the point of the pen down acts like a normal mouse click, as does the little eraser looking thing on the other end of the pen (unless you're in a program that supports eraser functions, in which case it acts like an eraser). If you get sick of trying to surf the web with a pen, there is also an included mouse that behaves just like any other two-button-with-wheel rodent. Well, aside from the fact that it's completely wireless, at least.
Since your mouse is the most manhandled and abused piece of your computer the durability of your mousing solution is a large concern. A graphics tablet, and especially one that you'll be using fulltime as a mouse like the Graphire, needs more care and upkeep than a regular old pack-in ball (or optical) mouse. The Graphire's tablet is covered with a plastic sheet doohickey to provide a good mousing surface. This surface will get scratched and scuffed in time if you aren't careful with it, but a rough feel with the tip of them pen should be about the extent of the worst of the damage. If you manage to gouge the covering with a pen or something then you're probably hosed. I haven't found replacement tablet covers anywhere yet. I find that a hose-and-wipe with some Armor-All or similar product will do wonders to clean, smooth, and protect your precious mousing surface. Armor-All can be used to smooth out minor scratches on the surface (as well as PDA screens and CD's, as it happens) if you let it go too long.
I do have one gripe with the Graphire- It has a low sampling rate. Several hundred times a second the tablet checks the location of the mouse or pen and sends the information down the wire to your computer. In this way, the tablet records a series of points that form the motion of the cursor on the screen. The Graphire does this a little slowly for my tastes, though. If you draw a curved line very fast you can see little angles in the stroke where the tablet couldn't keep up with you.
The Graphire comes with a decent set of included software considering its price. You get lots of little doodads that will integrate into Office or other productivity applications and let you scribble your signature on Word documents and such. You also get Corel's Painter Classic, which is a fun little program to use to experiment with the pressure sensitive pen. There's also a driver program, which allows you to reassign mouse and pen buttons, fiddle with pressure and speed settings, and other little nifty things. You don't actually have to install the driver- The tablet acts as a regular old USB Human Interface Device without it, but you can't change any settings.
The Graphire comes with lots of little hidden features as well. You can detach the pen holder from the tablet and rotate it to any orientation you chose. The driver program can be set to make the tablet behave like it's taller than it is wide, or you can have it only affect a set portion of your screen. You can lift up the transparent plastic cover and slip a page inside to trace over it. The tablet also coexists happily with a regular mouse in case you just can't part with your button-encrusted Intellimouse whatchamacallit.
The graphire does have one disadvantage, though. If you use the Graphire, you don't use DOS. USB devices don't work in DOS, so when you boot to the prompt the Graphire tablet simply doesn't exist as far as your computer is concerned. This includes booting Windows into safe mode- If you break something and need to run an emergency safe mode driver reinstallation, I hope you saved your old PS2 mouse. Even in DOS boxes under Windows the Graphire behaves a little strangely. It gets "stuck" at a certain point on the screen sometimes. When it does this you can't move the cursor past a certain point on the screen. Whipping the mouse around on the tablet a little temporarily solves this problem, but a minute or so later it crops up again- And usually in a different place. If you run DOS games or graphics applications with this thing you'll be wanting to hang your old mouse for the sake of your own sanity.
For less than a hundred bucks, though, the Wacom Graphire will probably be your favorite computer toy for ages. Recommended.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 99
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Epinions.com ID:
zero_
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Member: Robert "Zero" Drendall
Location: Claymont, DE, United States
Reviews written: 101
Trusted by: 19 members
About Me:
Providing your semi-regular dose of extreme verbosity since somewhere around the turn of the century.
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