Monoprice 10x6 in. Tablet - A Review Kind Of Deal

As my previous journal post indicates, there was a rather large flood in my hometown of Long Beach, NY. As such, I not only don't currently have a permanent home, but lost a lot of my personal belongings. Aside from my beloved rhythm game collection, I lost my Wacom tablet. Fine enough, really; it was an old-as-dirt Graphire 3. It desperately needed replacing. So I replaced it with something that seemed a lot better: The Monoprice 10x6.25 Inches Graphics Drawing Tablet With 8 Hot Key. Or for short: MTBSPTFIGDTWEHK.

I only have a few days of doodling with it to speak for, but overall I'm extremely satisfied. The size-to-price ratio alone is highly respectable, being that 10x6" of drawing surface was only $50. But it's also surprisingly accurate. There is jitter in the pen sometimes, but it's not terribly noticeable; any stabilisation settings in your program of choice would easily solve any issues. Supposedly the alternate pen that they have for sale is even more accurate, but I won't be able to say for sure until I get it, and I don't have a need for it at the moment. In any case, the stock pen seems fine, and I like the design of it a little more anyway.

Some people might take issue with the fact that the pen is battery-powered. I don't, especially when the estimated battery life is stated to be about 5000 hours on the alternate. That's over half a year. You'll probably be replacing your pen nibs more often than that, and those are ridiculously expensive on Wacom tablets. With a Monoprice tablet, you could probably buy a package of replacement nibs and a six-year supply of batteries for the cost of just a set of Wacom nibs. Rechargeable batteries will probably be even more economical. And of course, this is all ignoring how much money you already saved by not buying a much more expensive Wacom tablet.

As far as the tablet itself goes, it's got a very professional feel to it. It has a solid metal bottom, which helps to keep it sturdy and weigh it down just enough that it doesn't feel too light, but not too heavy either in case you need to carry it for one reason or another. The programmable buttons are quite handy as well. They're pre-defined with some redundant and pointless keyboard shortcuts, but all of them can be changed to do almost anything you want; even the sixteen "hot keys" on the drawing surface. So if need be, just get a few sticky labels, re-label the buttons and program them however you want. My recommended setup is to use the sixteen hot keys to switch tools in your drawing program, and the eight physical buttons for controls like zooming, rotating the canvas, undo/redo, etc.

There are issues, however. The main issue I have is that on a dual-monitor setup, a lot of programs don't work right. I've tried Paint Tool SAI, Autodesk SketchBook 2011, and a few others I can't remember at the moment. In these applications, if I have both monitors plugged into the computer, the tablet automatically gets switched to stretch across both monitors when the application is in focus, regardless of the tablet driver's settings. Unplugging the secondary monitor works fine, except that it kind of defeats the purpose of having two monitors available while I'm drawing. Kind of annoying. I had no issues when I tried the Adobe applications, though, so it's probably more an issue with the programs than the tablet drivers. A fix for this issue is to use the driver settings to scale the drawing area to the proper proportions for a dual-monitor setup. This means a much smaller drawing area, of course, but it's much less annoying than drawing ovals instead of circles. I could swear there used to be a way to save and load different driver profiles for different programs to save the trouble of having to re-scale the drawing area constantly, but after lots of re-installing the drivers that option seems to have disappeared. Strange.

There's also the issue of the cord being too short. Having to buy a USB extension cable just to plug your tablet into a tower just barely out of reach is a hassle I wish I didn't have to deal with, but it is what it is.

Because of a lot of piled-on minor flaws and the dual-monitor issues, I doubt this would replace a professional user's Wacom Intuos, and it's certainly no Cintiq. But it's ridiculously inexpensive and gets the job done more than well enough to justify the cost. I'd easily recommend this to anyone who wants a tablet but thinks Wacom's offerings are horrendously overpriced. (They are.)