Review: Wacom Intuos4 tablet

just ordered my medium one. Worth taking the time to shop around , especially if you are in canada. I found prices ranging from $422 , to $499 at the apple store and all the way up to $649 at another online retailer!!

I picked up the Intuos4 small (4x6"?) today. Using with a 24" monitor and so far find the small size adequate. No room on my desk top for anything larger anyway. Installation was pretty straight forward. The only glitch came after installation when I downloaded and installed the latest drivers. Got an error message saying the drivers and tablet were a mismatch. Rebooted and all came back up fine. As far as I can tell, the only error was the warning message.
Although there is definitely going to be a learning curve with using a pen rather than a mouse, I can already see the advantages. I'll come back with an update as soon as my hand-eye coordination improves
As for the hardware, it is very well made and looks great to boot. Not real keen on the mouse, though. It doesn't seem to track as well as my Logitech cordless mouse.

Thanks for the excellent review, sheawyatt. It was instrumental in my final decision.

I use an Intuos3 6x11" and am saddened by your review... I was happy before because it didn't sound like that much of an upgrade but the app-specific LED tags.... Bah!

Ah well, can't afford it anyhow. Thanks for posting - good info!

I have used the smaller gray one you post in your comparrison of the two, and didnt like the fact that i was using the pen on a tablet but looking at the monitor.

Is this new design one of the ones where you actually have the image right on the tablet? That would be sooooo sweet and would probably make me start using one again.

dandig wrote in post #7754312
just ordered my medium one. Worth taking the time to shop around , especially if you are in canada. I found prices ranging from $422 , to $499 at the apple store and all the way up to $649 at another online retailer!!

I know...I found one in Futureshop for $549, for the SMALL, the day after I got mine. Even with shipping, exchange rates, duty and taxes, it is still way cheaper to order from the States. I got mine from B&H.

EveryMilesAMemory wrote in post #7755383
I have used the smaller gray one you post in your comparrison of the two, and didnt like the fact that i was using the pen on a tablet but looking at the monitor.

Is this new design one of the ones where you actually have the image right on the tablet? That would be sooooo sweet and would probably make me start using one again.

The ones with the image displayed directly on the tablet are the Cintiq line, they start at $1000 for the 12", and $2000 for the 21".

I played around with my Intuos4 this weekend... It is my first tablet and I am very enthused by it. I was wondering if I had made the right decision to splurge on the medium, since I'm not really using the full tablet size. The area that I am using, however, is slight larger than the 4x6.

I have to add that I work using a 13" Macbook (I'd really like to get a 15" Macbook Pro, but my girlfriend got me this one for Christmas so I shouldn't complain). With the main Photoshop tools programmed into the tablet's buttons, I can go full screen with no menu bars and edit away. The only reason I need to go back from full screen is to switch layers. It's incredible. I'm finding more and more ways to customize my workflow.

Here's some work I did on the new tablet: https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=681273

I've had my Intuos4 for a couple weeks now, and it gets more and more comfortable every day - I've even found myself using it to web browse! I still haven't configured the hotkeys, but I think that I'm at that point, now - I think that, if you're new to tablets, you really have to get used to the flow before you can effectively customize. That being said, does anyone have any favorite mappings for LR2 or CS4?

The lower button on my pen is pan/scroll and the upper button is undo.

Otherwise, in PS CS4, I like the default radial settings. I use zoom, brush size, and rotate quite often. I haven't configured the other buttons.

I can be a little slow on the uptake, so maybe y'all already knew about this, but it was nice to find a solution to an annoyance -

If you hold the pen tip down, it'll sometimes register as a right click - this was extremely annoying when trying to grab sliders in LR/CS4. It would take multiple tries to select and drag to make an adjustment. I looked through the Wacom control panel to turn it off, but with no luck... on the way out, though, I noticed a Windows (Vista x64, at least) control panel for pens/tablets, too. It was there that the "hold to right click" was enabled! Unchecked the box, no more trouble grabbing sliders!

vincewchan wrote in post #7743225
Sorry for the double post,

I have a dual monitor setup, I'm sure you can setup the tablet to work with one monitor only correct? However, what if you need to drag a file from the other monitor to your workspace monitor?

How would that work?

I have an Intuos 3, and have one button set to toggle displays:

that's a really great idea up there