I had a stop over in Yokohama station this evening on my way back from Tokyo, so I figured hey, lets look at some toys. I went to Yodobashi, my favorite electronics store in Yokohama. Imagine a Frys Electornics or Best Buy that is a quarter the square footage per floor, but is 5 or 6 floors tall. It seems at first like they have a greater selection of things, but like stores in America, the selection is somewhat limited. While you may have five or six choices for a product, Yodobashi displays all of the colors of the product on the wall next to each other, even if it is redundant, and manages to fill up every square inch of wall and shelf space, creating the illusion of the store having an impossibly large selection.

There is however, a very diverse lineup of laptops. I poked around with some Panasonic Toughbooks, called the by engrishy brand name ”Let’s Note” in Japan, and some cool Sony laptops that were clear ripoffs of the MacBook line.

One thing that I found was unique to be on display, were fully functional Wacom tablets hooked up to computers. I don’t just mean a tablet for input, these were full LCD screens with clear Wacom Sensors over the display. Cool product.

Long I have thought that the mouse is entirely inadequate for drawing or doing precise dynamic inputs. As a human interface device, its great for something, but unless you are an expert, drawing is very difficult with them. Now, the Wacom tablets offer a few cool functions. One, is the use of a pen, with one end being an input, and one end being an eraser. Next, the pad only senses the pen, so if your hand lays on the pad while you are drawing, it will not sense it. Awesome. The pens take no batteries, which is neither here nor there for me, but it is nifty. However, you still with your basic tablet, have to look at a screen, and draw on the tablet. Finally, they have combined the two.

Great idea, great product, but the execution needs a bit of improvement.

First of all, the image quality on the screen sucks, hard core. Its washed out, dull, and unpleasant to look at. Sure its fine for a normal home user, but think about the target audience for these pieces of equipment that cost upwards of a grand… artists. Graphic Designers and the like require realistic, clear, true color. These displays simply did not offer that.

Problem two. What you do with the pen, and what displays on the screen, has a delay. I am not sure if mice have a similar delay, it doesn’t seem like it, but the fact that you can see the pen putting the information into the screen and you see the things you are causing to happen on the GUI lag behind your input device, its very distracting.

Problem three, its expensive… really really expensive.

Problem four. The pressure sensitivity. It is a great feature, but it is extremely difficult to actuate correctly. There is a dead spot for a short distance when you first touch it to the pad that does nothing, then an equally long distance after that it quickly does from least to full pressure, to the point where you are either doing very little or too much. I imagine that this is an easy fix, possibly the store pens were worn out, or maybe there are reasons for this that I just don’t know.

The advantages?

This idea is sweet. Human interface technology is the single most important computer feature besides networking / Internet access. This is the type of feature that the Iphone got so right that it is revolutionary for many users, its what Apple did to DOS, and its what the keyboard did to the Altair type of computer.

Also, the execution, while it could be better, is good enough. For what it is, it is a fantastic improvement over a keyboard and mouse.

Is it right for you?

For a non display type Wacom tablet, then possibly. Try it out first to see if you work well with having your vision different than your input when using a pen. It takes some getting used to, but I am sure you can do it if you can take the learning curve.

With the Cintiq display type tablets, if you have to ask, then no. With a price tag like the Cintiqs carry, then if its right for you, you already know about it through your profession. For general computer users, it does not offer enough of an improvement to truely make it worth while.

-The Digital Kitty