Okay so, Some of you, my beloved lurkers, if indeed you exist, may know that a while ago I bought myself a Wacom Cintiq 13 hd. I've been working with it for quite a while now and I reckoned it was about time I talked about it on my blog.

I've worked for years now with a very basic Wacom Bamboo one tablet which is a great graphic tablet to start off with. However it was never natural for me and drawing on the computer always took longer. I found it very uncomfortable to do, I much prefer traditional medium.
However the Cintiq is really, really good. It's a much more natural process, more than once I've caught myself trying to brush non existant rubber shavings off the screen after rubbing something out. My brain is so accustomed to the action.
The accuracy is really good. There are some small issues near the edges of the screen but it's unoticeable were it matters.  It's very easy to recalibrate if it is causing you issues.

 Many people in other reviews I've read complain about the lack of a zoom slide bar. To be honest, this may be because I've never had a zoom slide bar, but I've not found this an issue at all. I just assigned the key commands for zoom in/zoom out to two of the side key and boom! problem solved.
The side keys are fantastic, and speaking as someone who is tremendously lazy about personalizing equipment ( I changed the wallpaper on my new mobile, that's it, everything else is just as it came. What? I said I was lazy) you definitely need to adjust these, it makes life so much easier and quicker. The radial menu is also a beautiful thing and I imediatley assigned my most used tools to it.
Now, there are two issues that I've have with the Cintiq13 which, for me, are quite important. The first I'm not sure if is truely a problem with Wacom or with Adobe Photoshop. There is, and has been a problem with Photoshop and Wacom tablets for a while now (i think people have been noticing it since CS3) and it's still present. There are some moments when the driver will fail and the pressure measure will disappear, the eraser and the pen will switch briefly, the program will crash, there will suddenly be a time lag, I'm keeping track of the issues as they appear. The driver doesn't take well to sleeping the computer either.

The second issue is the way the various cables connet to the tablet itself, it's quite fragile and the weight of the cables pull on the connections, so, it's something you need to keep an eye on.

If you do your art work on a computer or a large amount of it is created on a computer, the cintiq is something you really need to look into buying. It's well worth it. You get the same control as with pencil and paper, it's absolutely wonderful, I can only imagine what the 22 hd and the 24 for is like.