Cintiq 12 WX initial review :DDD

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:

My baby has finally arrived and she's (yeah, it's a girl) soooo pretty!
The first time I've seen this tablet there was a 21 inch Cintiq right by her side, so I got the feeling she was very little, but 12" is so much bigger than the bamboo! It's even bigger than an iPad (not an iPad screen, the whole iPad)!

Now I haven't quite had the chance to decently try it out until yesterday night (the SAI configuration was quite a mess, but easy to handle once the glitches are understood and overcome) so I haven't either had time to talk about it on DA...

So here goes my first impressions on it:
I read in a lot of places that the tablet would always be badly calibrated at the screen edges, and it sucked. I immediatly tried it out on the edges and the result is: WHAT THE HELL?! Yeah, it's not perfect on the last centimeter of the edges, so what?! I used to draw on a 9x15 cm workspace, now I have a 16'5x26,5 cm, so I don't care if the last centimeter is a bit off. This might not be good for art students who draw on A3 sheets but I draw little on the corners of my books because I'm a dentistry student and I don't want the teachers to notice, so it's fine with me xD

Now the sensitivity. It's sooo great! It can even be changed according to your preference and while the Bamboo would only offer me one way to press it (as far as I know). It would usually have 3 types of line: soft, medium and hard. Not this plain (it's not that insensitive) but it was hard to get a midterm, while the Cintiq easily gets what you want

Drawing with this new device is very very nice. At my first attempt I could easily get my drawings to look like what they do on paper, which only happened once on the Bamboo and it took me two weeks of working around the clock without drawing on the paper a single time. And my paper coordination became zero. Not funny at all!

It's somehow uncomfortable, however, this new tablet feeling. It's like starting doing digital drawing all over again: I lost track of the sheet dimensions and I'm a bit uneasy with the tools, but overall I think this will be easy to get used to, because drawing with the Cintiq is really funny comparing to drawing with the Bamboo, and once I feel confident, we will be BFFs xD

The one thing that is bothering me about this tablet though are the cables. There is one only cable coming out of the Cintiq (that seems thick but easy to damage if twisted- and I've seen a damaged one already) and then, there is a Converter Unit, that divides the information into 3 other cables: the power cable, the image cable, and the usb information cable. There is also a huge power adapter box to link the power cable to the wall too... I don't mind a lot of cables, but I used to travel a lot with the Bamboo and the Cintiq is bothersome to set up everytime I want to change computers
And traveling with a 1000 dollar/euro object on my backpack may not be a good idea, and I'm even afraid to compress the main cable while traveling >__<


All in all, I think it was worth quite a few months of starving and giving up other things. Well, it's always worth, since it's an object for life and with this much quality, I won't need anything else to get my art to reach its full potential on the computer
I love it!!

------------------------------------------------------------


REVIEW AFTER 6 MONTHS USING THE CINTIQ:

- Calibration on the edges: I don't draw on the edges, it makes no difference to me that it's not calibrated!

- I can't live without this object anymore. Drawing on the paper became so no fun, even if I'm always drawing better there for some reason. Probably because I'm really relaxed. But then I miss the deform tools to adjust mistakes!

- The tablet's sensitivity is amazing!

- It wasn't even a deal in the begining, but now I'd apresciate a bigger screen so I wouldn't have to zoom in. I feel spoiled xD

- I barelly travel with my tablet now. Also because my computer spoiled me with his awesome ram power.

- I do have to say that some colors change their saturation from a normal monitor to a Cintiq. The Cintiq unsaturates it, so it all gets very bright and flashy if I don't adjust it on a normal screen.