There is something special about drawing on a piece of paper with pencils and an assortment of colors and inks. Most people learn how to draw using these materials, and thereby, whenever you pick up the pencil to draw something, a warm, familial feeling emerges.
But a drawing tablet can bring out the best of both worlds – the unique feeling of drawing on paper and all the promises of technology. With over 30 brands, buying the right tablet takes patience and thorough research from websites like Drawingbyte. Therefore, this article focuses on simplifying your search.
To narrow down the model that would work best for you, try to answer these questions:
- How much do you draw or plan on using the device?
- How often do you draw – once a day, thrice a week, or hardly ever?
- How much will you have to move around with the drawing tablet?
- As drawing tablets come in varying sizes, how much space do you have in your room to store the device?
The answers to these questions will reflect a clear picture of your needs, and you will be better prepared to strike off anything that doesn’t fit the bill.
Resolution
The device’s resolution is crucial in determining its value and justifying any investment you make in it. Unlike laptop and television screens, the resolution in graphics tablets is measured by lines per inch (LPI). It refers to how many lines per inch the tablet screen processes and is directly related to how much detail it can detect from the stylus. Therefore, the higher the LPI, the better the detailing of the artwork.
The question is, what is the ideal resolution for your needs. As a beginner, tablets with lower resolutions will do just fine if you are starting to learn how to draw on a graphics tablet. For things like logo design and webtoons, you may not need fine detailing. But if you are going for photo-realistic drawings, higher resolution might be a justifiable investment.
Pressure Sensitivity
Pressure sensitivity is related to how deep and thick the drawing tablet captures the strokes or lines of your drawing. If you press the stylus harder while drawing, a pressure-sensitive device will identify that stroke as a thick line. But if the device is not sensitive to pressure, all the strokes detected will be without any variation.
If you already have experience drawing on a physical surface like paper, you may be able to comprehend the vast difference it can create in the final artwork. Hence, if you want to produce high-quality drawings, you need to have a pressure-sensitive device. Pressure sensitivity in drawing tablets can range somewhere between 300 to 3,000 points.
Tracking Speed
Drawing tablets are connected to devices like laptops or desktops that record the drawing being made on the device. You will often find that when you move the stylus pen in low-end models, the lines detected on the computer screen will have a time lag. This lag in detection is caused because the device has a low points per second (PPS) rating.
The higher the PPS rating of a device, the lower the delay in detecting your drawing. For greater efficiency, you want a drawing tablet with the highest PPS you can afford.
It would be sensible to always keep a tab on the latest models entering the market, as the technology in graphics tablets is developing quite rapidly. All you have to do is check websites like Drawingbyte to keep yourself abreast of the recent developments in the field.
