Wacom ArtZ II Graphics Tablet

Drawing the old-fashioned way

The Wacom ArtZ II graphics tablet lets you work the same way you do with apaper tablet. You just pick up the tablet's pen and write, draw, or paint.Unlike your mouse, the Wacom ArtZ II graphics tablet has a natural feel and isaccurate. For example, try signing your name with your mouse. Disastrous, isn'tit? With the ArtZ II, recording your signature is as easy as signing a check.

Wacom makes graphics tablet in a range of sizes from 4"*5" to 18"*25",and all work with Windows NT. They have a transparent overlay that lets you drawover other artwork or use CAD templates. Across the top, the tablets have aprogrammable menu strip that you can use to program keyboard shortcuts.

The pressure- and tilt-sensitive pen makes the Wacom tablet shine over othertablets and mouse devices that I've used. These pens don't have cords orbatteries to get in your way, and they are very responsive. The pens have abutton on the tip and one or two on the side. The tip responds like a leftmouse-click and is pressure sensitive. You can program the side buttons torespond as mouse buttons with a right-click, middle-click, left-click, leftdouble-click, or a left click-lock, which is useful for dragging stuff aroundthe screen. Also, you can program the buttons to respond as an Alt-, Control-,or Shift-key modifier. Two models of these pens have a pressure- andtilt-sensitive eraser, which works like an eraser on a pencil if an applicationis eraser-aware.

I reviewed the ArtZ II 12*12 graphics tablet on a 200MHz Pentium Pro with32MB of RAM running Windows NT. The tablet comes with a pen, a serial cable, apower supply, software, and a manual. (See "Wacom Graphics Tablet Models,", forinformation about the complete line of products.) Setup is easy. You connect oneend of the serial cable to the back of the tablet and the other end to the backof your computer. Then you plug the power transformer into the wall outlet andthe other end directly into the computer end of the serial cable. Hooking up thepower to the serial cable rather than the tablet seems kind of strange, but itkeeps the wire clutter on your desk to a minimum. After you plug in the tablet,boot your system, pop in the 3.5" floppy, run the setup program, and clickContinue. The program sets up a Control Panel applet and installs some driversand system services. Reboot your system and log on. You now have a functioningtablet that you can use instead of your mouse.

Initially, using a pen to select menu items and to open, close, and resizewindows felt strange. But after opening Adobe Photoshop 3.0.5 and using the pento draw and paint, I really like it. You can customize the Photoshop tools torespond in various ways to the pressure-sensitive pen. For example, you can setup the paintbrush tool to change color, darken, or (my favorite) change width bychanging the pressure you apply with the pen on the tablet.

If you do a lot of work with Photoshop (or any drawing tool for thatmatter), I recommend taking a serious look at these tablets. You won't know whatyou did without one! Table 1 lists applications that support Wacom's graphicstablet.