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04-April-2002 - Article by Chris "takai" Porter A very short time ago, in a suburb close to you a uni student crept out of his flat with a feeling of great trepidation. He slunk down to the local shop and bought..... a graphics tablet. Anyway enough with the prose and on with the review. While graphics tablets have been around for a fair while, they certainly haven't been priced near the general consumer's budget. Until now... well for a little while now. Wacom recently released their new range of graphics tablets, which includes the little baby of the family; the Graphire2. Within the old range of tablets the Graphire1 was the baby, but certainly didn't even come within groping distance of the new Graphire2.  click to enlarge Now this dimiunitive little tablet
may not seem like much, but it has quite a few of the features
which its big brothers sport and despite its small size (4"x5")
it still packs quite a punch.
Well maybe the last two aren't really features, but the others are all quite cool. Wacom sell the Graphire2 in two different packs, one with a weird no-ball mouse as well as the pen and the other without the mouse. Due to being in genus Studentes Pennieless I decided to save the $20 and get the mouseless one. When I first plugged in the Graphire2, Windows (2000 SP1) automagically detected it as an input device and enabled it along with my mouse. However, the default Windows drivers for the Graphire are not too useful and subsequently the cursor stutters around the screen like a lethargic old granny with her walker. Everything improved noticeably as soon as I installed the drivers for the device though, and continued to improve when i upgraded them to the latest copy. The first thing you tend to notice though is that the whole tablet is mapped linearly to the screen, i.e. the lower right corner of the pad corresponds to the lower right corner of the screen. So that was the first "feature" to be remedied.  click to enlarge With the Graphire now running in "mouse mode" life became even sweeter, now the cursor moves around the screen like a mouse and you can pickup and drop the pen elsewhere on the pad without the cursor bouncing around like a rabbit on eccy. In normal mode the eraser end (blue bit) acts as just another cursor, along with the front end. However, once you start the ubiquitous Adobe Photoshop then the pen takes on another life of its own. Photoshop seems to somehow, undoubtedly using its uber elite powers of checking the registry, know you have a Graphire plugged in and automatically enable such features as the 512 pressure levels and the eraser on the end. So if you press harder on the pad you get a thicker line and softer a thinner. The eraser end also somehow changes the cursor to the eraser tool, again magically. These two features on their own greatly speed up the process of creating digital imagery on your PC. Apart from the funky features which the Graphire sports it has in innately cool feature, and while it may be quite obvious it is still very cool. This is the pen, sure on its own it doesn't look like much, but combined with the pad and artistic skill it becomes a weapon of cool. Simply put this is the main reason you buy a graphics pad, because drawing with a pen beats drawing with a mouse any day, rain or shine. However, ergonomically for day to day stuff in Windows, mousing around running apps etc, it is absolutely horrible, and the humble mouse is definitely the better option, both ergonomically and speed wise. I have also found that if you end up drawing for a long period of time the Graphire, via Photoshop, will end up taking 100% processor utilisation which in turn makes Photoshop slightly sluggish. This however may be the fault of the tiny C500 processor which I have in my laptop. Contrary to what several other reviewers have said, I have found no problem with the Graphire making straight lines when being used in many quick rounded strokes. Here is an example of what can be done with the Graphire in about 30 minutes:  click to enlarge Ok I must admit that I did cheat, the ink outline was scanned in on my Canon N670U and then cleaned up in Photoshop (with the Graphire). But it was all colored and shaded with the Graphire. Conclusion: Overall: 4.5 / 5 due to the slight
CPU utilisation problem. Other Recent Reviews:
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