On Saturday, Oct. 1, and Sunday, Oct. 2, the whole world will be walking again with Scott Kelby, president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) and bestselling computer and technology book author, in his Fourth Annual Worldwide Photo Walk™ — the world’s largest global social photography event in the history of photography.
On Saturday, Oct. 1, and Sunday, Oct. 2, the whole world will be walking again with Scott Kelby, president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) and bestselling computer and technology book author, in his Fourth Annual Worldwide Photo Walk™ — the world’s largest global social photography event in the history of photography.
When it comes to tools for integrating freehand art into the digital workflow, Wacom remains the leader. Its tools aren't perfect--and certainly aren't cheap--but it's hard to find any more respected. And when it comes to drawing, nothing yet beats pen (or pencil) and paper for fluidity and portability. Wacom attempts to combine the best of both worlds with its Inkling, a pen and receiver combo that tracks your penstrokes for up to 50 sketches and uploads them to a computer for use with applications like Photoshop or Illustrator.
ICP Electronics Australia presents the ICEFIRE 10.4” Mobile Clinic Assistant, an IP64 compliant medical-use tablet PC, which is based on Intel and Windows open architecture.
The ICEFIRE 10.4” features dual mode input that utilises both WACOM digitiser and traditional resistive touch input with auto-sensing and auto-switching. The ICEFIRE also includes dual hot swappable batteries, wireless and advanced data acquisition technologies with inbuilt Gobi 2000 and RF technologies.
The ICEFIRE 10.4” Mobile Clinic Assistant can make wireless connections to WLAN and WAN and can be customised to meet the needs of point of care and other healthcare applications. This allows the medical-use tablets to offer safer, more efficient and higher quality patient care in medical services.
The ICEFIRE 10.4” Mobile Clinic Assistant tablet PCs are available from ICP Electronics Australia and comes in an ergonomic and lightweight design.
The Flow is a paintbrush designed specifically for your iPad or Android tablet. It's the perfect companion to the modern touchscreen canvas. The Flow looks and feels just like a paintbrush with its soft bristled tip and svelte design.
As an artist, I’ve always wanted some sort of one-to-one input when working in Photoshop or zBrush. I’ve used several of the traditional input tablets, but I’ve never been fully satisfied. I still ended up drawing on paper and scanning the results. It’s just more natural.
Input tablets have been constantly improving in the decades they’ve been around. But the technology remains imperfect. The pressure-sensitive pad sits on the desk, separate from the screen, which takes away some of that natural feel you get from drawing with a pen, especially when trying to add tiny details to your work.
So I jumped at the chance to test the Cintiq, a tablet that tries to do away with that annoying physical disconnect by allowing you to draw directly on the surface of an LCD screen.
Few devices make you reassess your career choices, but the Wacom Cintiq is one of them. The interactive pen display device makes us wish we'd gone to art school and learned how to draw (instead of listening to our parents and study law). This newest model, the Cintiq 24HD has just been approved by the FCC and, while the documents don't reveal much, we presume it's a 24-inch (and HD-resolution) follow up to last year's device.
Comparison between Wacom tablets and PC tablets
The Cregle PenBook is a new tablet computer with a 10 inch display. But while most tablets hitting the market this year run Google Android, the PenBook is a Windows 7 machine. It also adds a digital pen for handwriting and drawing to the mix.
We first heard about the PenBook last month, and now the tablet has shown up at the FCC website. While there’s still no official release date, it looks like the computer is inching a little closer to reality.
What you are seeing here is a type of interface that could easily be the future. Designed by Kei Nakatsuma, a PhD student at the University of Tokyo, it allows the user to use the back of their hand as a mouse pad and a finger as a mouse.
I think we used to dream of an era where everyone had a two-way wrist communicator like Dick Tracy, but the age of cellular phones makes that practically obsolete. An interface like this could bring that back.
“India is the fastest-growing market for Wacom, hence we are investing significantly in sprucing up our Indian subsidiary. This will include adding more sales people, expanding and enhancing post-sales, and increasing demand for our products both in the consumer and commercial segments,” said Shigeki Komiyama, Director & Executive Officer, Japan & APAC, Wacom.
The Wacom tablet range includes the entry-level pen and multi-touch input device under the Bamboo series for consumers; Intuos for creative pros; high-end Cintiq pen input with LCD display; and the business range for the commercial segment.
The prestigious Chateau St. Michelle Wine Estates in Washington uses the combination of the Wacom DTZ-2100 interactive pen display with Esri software to display precision canopy density in the vineyard. The aerial imagery is converted to the NDVI format (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), which displays the photosynthetic output of plants, based on their spectral bands in aerial imagery. The DTZ-2100 pen’s accuracy makes it possible to pinpoint specific plants easily, so their fruit can be picked separately to take advantage of certain flavor characteristics.“We’ve found a correlation between the size of the canopies and the grape flavors,” says Jennifer Smithyman of St. Michelle. “Many of our winemakers have preferences, such as grapes with more vegetal characteristics and others prefer more fruit flavors. Because the Wacom display allows our georeferencing to be so accurate, we can divide the vineyard into different zones for separate picking to give the winemakers what they want.”
“GIS is providing new insight into the importance of maps and is making industries like wine more targeted with resource allocation, which in turn leads to greater efficiency. This increased efficiency is especially important in these current economic times,” says Gabriel Schmidbauer, GIS professor at American Sentinel University.”
The new project involves the same pen mount product – a magnet holds your Wacom or drawing pen in place so you can use the keyboard and then flip it back into your hand when you’re ready to draw
Verdict:
You'll have to be pretty big on tablet doodling to justify shelling out £25 for a capacitive stylus, but if you are, there are no finer options than Wacom's Bamboo Stylus for iPad. A well-weighted finger alternative with a responsive nib, you'll be an iPad Picasso in no time with the stylus. We'd personally like to have seen a smaller tip, which we believe would have lead to even greater accuracy in our hands, but for the most part this will be a point of personal preference, married with the brush/ tip size specifications of the app you're using. Highly recommended otherwise.
Wacom Co., a manufacturer of touch-based graphic tablets and pens with U.S. operations headquartered in Vancouver, reported a 21 percent year-over-year drop in U.S. sales and 6.2 percent drop worldwide for the fiscal quarter ending June 30. The company recorded about $21.2 million in U.S. sales and $92.3 million worldwide for the quarter.
The Japanese company’s quarterly earnings report, issued last week, attributed the drop to the lingering impact of the March 11 Japan earthquake on manufacturing, the rising value of the Japanese yen, and a change in its product line that dampened sales.
Signature Capturing
Telepass has rolled out 300 signature tablets of the type SignPad eSignio (Wacom STU-500). This kind of signature tablet was chosen because signatures captured on its screen resemble the way signatures look on paper almost perfect. Signers experience a natural way of signing on screen unlike on devices known from courier services. They have the visual impression that their signature is taken seriously. The large 5 inch screen of the SignPad eSignio allows displaying corresponding text the purpose of signing clear and crisp and it offers also excellent visibility of content on screen in bright Italian sunshine due to its reflective TFT. Another reason for Telepass to choose the SignPad eSignio was its long life expectancy due to its robust design. The sensor lies below the display surface, preventing the wear and tear found in devices based on other technologies. Softpro hardware partner Wacom has developed the SignPad eSignio based on detailed specifications from the German signature experts. Wacom and Softpro joined forces with the Italian specialist for electronic document processing Kartha who are supplying the SignPads to Telepass.
Click here if you want more information about the HP Elitebook!Pen and Touch
A dual pen + touch digitizer is standard on the 2760p. It is the Wacom digitizer model with two-finger input. Responsiveness is excellent, as is typical of the brand. As previously stated, touch works well up to and at the edges of the display.
Pen input, however, loses precision near the edges. This normal for Wacom digitizers, as I’ve seen this on every one I’ve used. It’s fine for tapping buttons, but you’ll see wobbliness while jotting notes in the margins. Of course, between zoom and infinite virtual pages, it’s not like you’ll be squeezed for writing space. Away from the edges, both pen and touch work fine. The strengthened glass screen provides a no-flex writing area.
Have you been using your pen tablet to create artwork and retouch images? Then we want to see! Submit you art or photo creations to Wacom's "Summer of Sharing" Contest for your chance to cash in on a huge bank of prizes!
In his Burbank office at Film Roman, a Starz Media Company, he uses the Wacom Cintiq tablet that works like a sketch pad. He draws the actors and the acting by pressing the pen to the tablet and the image transfers onto the computer screen.
