Here’s a question if you are a professional artist/illustrator or a hobbyist looking to create beautiful digital artwork, “What drawing tablet should you get?”. There are so many tablets these days but these three mentioned here are the biggest names in the game. I have been using a Wacom Intuos tablet for many years and I am very comfortable drawing on it but since the Intuos does not have a display, I need to have a computer connected to it and if you are like me and looking to buy a good drawing tablet for yourself, this comparison between the three giants might help you.
# Wacom MobileStudio Pro
This is the latest product by Wacom and is an obvious choice if you are a professional artist, especially if you spend most of your waking hours with a drawing pen in your hand. The Wacom MobileStudio Pro comes in two different sizes – the 13 Inch and the 16 Inch. It is a full blown windows computer with either an Intel Core i5 or an i7 processor, hard drive capacity ranges from 64GB to 512GB along with expandable memory and RAM from 4 to 16GB. The MobileStudio Pro with the highest configuration even comes with a 4GB Quadro M1000M graphics card which is a professional grade graphics card designed for creative professionals. Since this product is made by Wacom, there is no doubt that the drawing experience will be of the highest standard. Their new Pro Pen 2, has upto 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity! That’s 4 times more than any other digital pen out there, and like other Wacom Pens, it does not require any battery or charge. It also has physical keys on the side of the display which can be easily customised according to the application you use. You will hardly find any issues when using this product but like all products it has its cons and the biggest one would be the portability since it does not have a keyboard, you will need to carry a bluetooth keyboard along with you and since the battery only lasts around 3-4 hours, the power brick is a must have. But if you work only from one place and portability is not an issue, than this tablet is the one for you, as long as you are willing to pay premium price for it since it can cost anywhere from Rs. 1,00,000 to Rs. 1,68,000.
# Surface Pro 4
Microsoft really did a great job with the Surface lineup and later this year, they are expected to release the next Surface Pro but one can’t deny that the Surface Pro 4 is an absolute marvel. It is an ideal device for anyone who likes to take their work on the go and especially for digital artists who need the power of desktop applications in a sleek machine. The Surface pro comes in a wide range of variations from Intel Core m3 processors all the way to to an i7 chip. With premium build quality, a 12.3 Inch display and very impressive durability, the Surface Pro 4 can last for a long time. And with a full windows 10 Operating system running the show, you will get all the bells and whistles of professional applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Manga Studio and Corel Painter. The Surface Pen is a great tool and it works seamlessly with the Pro 4, although there are small software glitches which you will notice if you are a stickler for details. But if you want to use pro desktop apps on a device with great portability, there is none greater than the Surface Pro 4.
# iPad Pro
Apple has always been known to create great products and they nailed it with the iPad Pro. This device is powerful, never shows any lag, it has a long battery life and the Apple Pencil is very accurate and feels natural. But the biggest problem with the iPad pro is that you can’t run any of the professional desktop applications natively. Sure, there are great apps like Procreate and sketchbook, but there are limitations on what you can do in these apps when compared with something as powerful as Photoshop. This is obviously not an issue if you are a sketch artist or you need portability above all, but 99% of the time, you will need to take your artwork to a desktop application to finish it off. However, you can use desktop applications on the iPad with the help of an app like Astropad which mirrors your desktop on your iPad in order to use the iPad like a Wacom Cintiq but this dethrones the whole talk about portability.
In conclusion, all three devices are great in their own way and they are built for different people. The Wacom MobileStudio Pro is meant for the professional who makes a living through their art, the Surface Pro 4 is for the artist who needs the power of desktop applications on the go and the iPad Pro is for the artist who does not need sophisticated applications but a reliable drawing tablet.
