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Comment by deltaqueue | Hacker News Reader

Can any artists on HN comment on how useful styli are with tips this thick? I suspect the added thickness is required for capacitive touch screens, but I always thought my fingertip was far too thick for accurately initiating thin lines or dots (e.g. in games like Draw Something). Something like this seems like it would require far less erasing:

http://www.wacom.com/en/us/everyday/bamboo-stylus-feel-samsu...

*edited for clarity

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For drawing, you can get away with larger tips, but I cannot understand how can people use those soft-rubber tips for capacitive screens, where the center-point of contact is actually moving as you scrub the screen. For comparison, I use a Wacom Intuos 5 large, and I'm already noticing that the pen tilt affects the position of the cursor (a 45' angle moves the point up to 0.5mm in the direction of tilt).

I saw several people taking notes with those pens though, but the note-taking applications offer a large "writing" area where you can write text as big as 4cm in height. I honestly cannot write efficiently at that size.

The "Pencil" here also has such a large tip that clearly covers the area of contact even if you use it with the short side up. I assume you will be able to figure out the point of contact after a while, but I would have chosen a normal pen design, not an "artisan pencil" at all.

The added thickness is to compensate for the fact that the iPad touch screen has a reasonable distance between sensors. You cannot get pixel-perfect accuracy on the iPad touch screen, and a pointed stylus would make that extremely apparent. So instead the trend is for larger tips, to encourage users to bump up their line thicknesses and to obscure the lack of pixel-perfect accuracy. Think marker, not pen.

It's my understanding that the inaccuracy is not due to the distance between sensors - but rather that Apple/etc have configured the sensors to only respond to contact points over a certain size (to reduce interference from power supplies and other imperfections)

Consumption device, not a creative device.

It's certainly plausible that touches that are small enough are ignored, although I don't know if that's actually true. But even if it is, that doesn't change what I said.

> Consumption device, not a creative device.

Do you honestly believe that? Are you just burying your head in the sand, or do you actually think that all of the people out there happily creating things on their iPads don't count for some reason?

> Do you honestly believe that? Are you just burying your head in the sand, or do you actually think that all of the people out there happily creating things on their iPads don't count for some reason?

People working around the significant restrictions preventing content creation are the exceptions that prove the rule, in my opinion. I'm glad they're able to do it, but the iPad certainly wasn't designed to enable it.

> but the iPad certainly wasn't designed to enable it.

That is the biggest load of bullshit I've heard all day.

I have a couple thick-point styli. I hate 'em. I just got a fine-point Adonit Script, which is not without its problems (no pressure sensitivity, not much app support yet) but oh man I can actually DRAW with the damn thing instead of scrawling with a big crayon.

That said I'm still finding myself just reaching for a traditional sketchbook and a cheap pen when I want to do some quick drawing, and opening up the laptop to run Illustrator when I want to do Serious Work.

Useful for sketching but any real work is going to be done with an actual drawing tablet like the ones Wacom makes.

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