Wacom Cintiq 21X Atlanta GA

Rating: 9/10

Ever since the advent of personal computers there have been products which are placed firmly outside the everyday computing experience by their price alone. The original Apple Macintosh and colour laser printers are all excellent examples of this phenomenon. The Wacom Cintiq is clearly in that arena. Its £2,000 plus price tag means that only graphics professionals at the best studios are ever going to use it. We may have lusted after these things but we couldn't afford them. However, the other iron law of computing is that prices come down - and fast. Macs are now no more expensive than PCs and colour laser printers are increasingly common, though they're still far from cheap. Sadly, the Wacom Cintiq is still horrendously expensive. For those who don't know, the Cintiq is a combination of a top of the range pen-based graphics tablet and high-resolution monitor. No more drawing with the mouse, or even struggling with a graphics tablet, the Cintiq allows the user to sketch directly on the screen.

The Wacom Cintiq 21X's screen is a combination of a high-resolution UXGA 21.3-inch liquid crystal display with a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 pixels). The screen is of superb quality, as one would expect from a professional-level product such as this, and comes with an ICC profile for colour accuracy. The drawing experience - be that sketching in a vector application such as Illustrator, or masking or painting in Photoshop is superb: the pen is well-built and features 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity. Moving the pointer is done by hovering the pen above the screen. Clicking is achieved by touching the pen's nib directly onto the screen. The pen also features dedicated buttons for double clicking and right clicking. Drawing is a fairly simple matter of positioning the nib on the screen and drawing just as one would with a real pen. Enhancing the drawing experience is the fact that the entire tablet can be moved along its vertical axis between 10 and 60 degrees, allowing for near-horizontal operation just like a traditional drawing board. One quick note about the value score. We scored the Cintiq as seven out of ten, here's why: if you spend all day drawing on a computer the Cintiq is a revelation and worth ever penny but for the rest of us it's not much more than an expensive folly, albeit a fun one.

For more information, visit Micromart.co.uk