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Comment by omnimus | Hacker News Reader

Nobody wants A4 tablet trust me its not worth it. Ive seen so many pros replace them with A5 or even A6 because its better and more convinient.

On the other hand any other brand than the leading brand is truly terrible.

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Actual pros replace them with cintiq or similar and are always larger than A4. I've never seen a full time designer move down size, because you lose fidelity at the same zoom level and are constantly fiddling with zoom which is a source of major frustration

Of course you want cintiq as big as possible but not tablet. With A4 you get to a point where you have to move a lot around the table with hand in front of you while you are looking straight at your screen its just akward. You dont have space for keyboard etc.

I can corroborate this. A full size tablet is not always ideal. Display tablets like Cintiqs benefit from larger size because you are drawing 1:1 on a screen. The size allows for comfortable viewing as well as full arm movements on a surface that resembles a drafting table. However, traditional graphics tablets require you to draw on a separate surface while looking up at a monitor. The screen is mapped to the tablet surface, so to move the 10 inches on a 27" monitor to reach a button, you might instead only move your pen tip 1 or 2 inches. In this case, it's often easier to draw using small movements, and zoom in and out as required to work on structure or detail.

Using a large tablet is like using a mouse with the sensitivity turned down. It quickly becomes frustrating having to move your arm around so much to manage the interface, especially when you don't have a direct connection between what you're looking at and touching.

The difference is why someone might use a steno pad or moleskin journal rather than a full-size legal pad.

An illustrator friend bought an A3 Wacom years ago. It was so big that if you put legs on it it’d be a reasonable sized desk by itself.

He ended up changing the mapping to only use a small portion near the front as he could barely reach the back.

I'm doing this for my A4-sized tablet too. At times. I still have the option (and I'm using it) for the full tablet area. I don't have this for the postcard-sized scribblers.

I do! This doesn't make sense to me. I have a Galaxy Note 12.2, and it's great, but bigger would be better (it's not quite A4). I also have a 12"×9" Wacom Intuos, 12" Surface Pro, 15" Surface Book 2 from work. All of those would be even better bigger (but the work laptop wouldn't fit in my backpack any more). I have a small Wacom tablet too, and it's too small to be very useful.

Touchscreens and Tablets are something very different. Sure you want as big screen as possible.

I bet most people who switch to touchscreens never want tablet back. Many people prefer tablets over touchscreens because you don't have to slouch.

Yeah, I am a pro artist and I have played with screen tablets and I do not like the way they make me hunch over my work surface and ruin my back, I really like that I can have my screen at the proper height above my desk and my tablet at the most comfortable place on my desk. No slouching, no achy spine, no ending up with nose prints on the screen because I hunch closer instead of using the zoom capabilities.

Devices like the Galaxy Tab S6 are basically a very powerful Android tablet with low latency high precision pen input (also does pressure and tilt detectio) via the supplied S pen (uses basically the same battery free technology as Wacom tablets).

As I mentioned, I have two graphics tablets (i.e. without screens), both Wacom, one large and one small. The small one is not very useful, and the larger one (~A4 drawing area) would be even more useful a bit bigger.

I would be interested in seeing videos of how people draw with tablets and touchscreens. Esp drawing with a small A6 tablet.

> Nobody wants A4 tablet trust me its not worth it.

Why should I do so when I have my own experience?

> On the other hand any other brand than the leading brand is truly terrible.

So you've tried them all? Not to talk about the use cases...

True i havent tried them all. Ocassionaly somebody around has some wierd brand and it has never been really good. But it might just be certain feeling wacoms have that is something acquired and might not mean it's better.

It's possibly it's something the Wacom drivers is doing (smoothing, etc). There's a game called osu! where lots of people play with graphics tablets, and a lot of people use cheaper chinese (Gaomon) tablets, with open source drivers that let you emulate the smoothing of Wacom drivers.

https://github.com/hawku/TabletDriver

Super interesting never heard of this. I thought its software because hardware could be copied. Also the big difference are usually other things than movement/pointing its pressure and tilt where Wacom is pretty great.

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