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Comment by evoxed | Hacker News Reader

Funny! Just today I gave my girlfriend a monoprice tablet after seeing the review by this guy. I'm writing this message with it– it's awesome! Better than any of the Wacoms live used either at school or work, and with a pretty hackable (though already more than acceptable) case. (Running Mountain Lion on a MacBook Pro.) There was a time when Wacom was the only dog in town, seems that won't be the case for much longer.

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UC Logic tablets have been around for a long, long time. We bought a pair for $24.99 each (DigiPro brand) from ThinkGeek around 2006, they had great accuracy. One of them still works today.

They've been around, but I don't know of anyone who took them seriously back then (as a designer). My memory was that the driver was really spotty (the current one seems to work pretty well) and the pens broke very quickly. At the time the Wacoms were built like tanks, and so on the surface at least it seemed like a no-brainer for professional work. I never tried a Yiynova so I can't say for that but the second hand reviews I got weren't so great either until now, with the UC Logic components. Anyway, I'm glad that more people are discovering them now, especially myself! ;)

Drivers were fine, little to none jitter, good pressure sensitivity. The windows software for calibration was ugly but completely functional, you could set the sensitive area (great for widescreen), define hotspots etc. You could even set it to a "mouse mode" (relative movement) and play FPS games with it :)

Wacoms over here used to cost up to 20x as much (>$500). This made the DigiPro ones the no-brainers. At the time tablets were not common at all due to high prices. They still sell the exact same model for bargain prices, but intuos/bamboo have fallen to the $100-200 range.

Hehe, FPS was actually the first thing I remember thinking when I used a Graphire– I remember wishing there was some zero latency Cintiq type thing so that Counter Strike could become digital Whack-a-Mole.

I was actually looking for a Bamboo this Christmas... tried it, realized it was kinda crappy, then decided to give the UC-L another chance. I'm beyond pleased! The thing is most people I know working in illustration or design just deal with the cost of the Wacom, since we already spend so much on regular media! Hopefully a few of them will try mine out and see what we've all been missing.

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