Photo: XP-Pen
Let’s get this out of the way: I love gadgets.
Friends, family, and co-workers know I can geek out on devices I would personally want to have, but sometimes don’t actually need.
As a frustrated illustrator, it has always been my dream to have my own pen display tablet because years ago I was fascinated about the idea you could draw on a monitor as if you were drawing on paper (this was around 2003 when large, portable touchscreen devices weren’t that many yet). The first big spending I made when I started working was buying a Wacom Bamboo tablet. I loved it dearly as it drew me one step closer to achieving my dream gadget.
By now, you already know where this is going based on this post’s title. After years of finding the right opportunity, I finally bought my first pen display last month—the XP-Pen Artist 12 Pro.
Before I continue, apologies I couldn’t take actual photos of the tablet because 1) I don’t have a physical workspace (aka table), just worked on my bed and 2) I only thought of doing this review after I finished my work. If I do future reviews, I do hope to resolve this for a more personal experience.
Design and Features
Photo: XP-Pen
The Artist 12 Pro has the basic features of any tablet, shortcut keys on one side and your main display for your workspace. The main display isn’t touchscreen and actually measures 11.6 inches. I personally prefer matte finish monitors for that anti-glare and was happy the Artist 12 Pro had this feature.
Build quality is great and doesn’t look and feel cheap. I appreciate the tablet also comes with its own stand and an artist glove as many tablets don’t have these additional accessories out of the box.
I won’t go through the entire nitty-gritty of the specs so here’s the link where you can check it.
Setting Up
Photo: XP-Pen
To be honest, set-up was fairly quick and easy. After unboxing everything, I just connected the tablet to my laptop, downloaded the latest driver in XP-Pen’s website, installed the program and opened it to tweak the settings a bit, and that it! I use Windows so after doing everything, I restarted my laptop just to make sure everything worked well.
For my monitor settings, I preferred the extended of dual monitor display as a more efficient set-up.
What took a while for me was adjusting the settings to my liking such as display, customizing the shortcut keys for each program I’ll use, and, most important of all, calibrating the pen for a more accurate experience.
Performance
Photo: XP-Pen
I’ve been testing the Artist 12 Pro for the past two weeks. My benchmark for pen displays has always been the industry-leading Wacom devices so I already had a set of expectations on what I was looking for. Before buying, I binge-watched tons of reviews on YouTube about different tablet brands to see their pros and cons and help me decide which one to get.
I used two programs during my testing, Autodesk SketchBook and Krita.
Lines and strokes were easy to control because of the pen’s high pressure sensitivity. Everything stayed consistent and steady as I moved the pen. I was very satisfied with how smooth and clean the pen worked.
The real story, however, happens between the pen and screen. When I started doing the line art in SketchBook, there was a significant parallax. Parallax is the distance between the cursor and where the pen is actually pointing—the lesser it is, the more accurate. In this case, zooming in on my work made the parallax even worse.
At first, I thought maybe my calibration was wrong, but after adjusting so many times, I just couldn’t resolve the parallax issue. I even tried to restart my laptop thinking it must be a Windows issue, but to no avail—the parallax was there to stay. It was especially bothersome and more evident when I was drawing over my sketch to make the line art. The cursor just didn’t end up where my pen was pointing.
I almost gave up halfway through, but I tried a different program to see if the same issue persisted. To my surprise, the parallax was barely there when I used Krita. I calibrated the pen again though in hopes of completely removing the parallax, but there’s a subtle parallax, around half a millimeter.
This is just me nitpicking, but, yeah, you get what you pay for I guess. At least this time it was more bearable and once I got the hang of it, the small parallax didn’t bother me and my workflow.
For the remainder of my testing, I used Krita to finish my work. I didn’t have any other issues afterwards.
Price
I got the Artist 12 Pro on sale last month. It was originally priced at PHP 17,200 (340 USD), but I bought mine for only around PHP 9,200 (180 USD). It was really a steal considering the additional accessories that came with the tablet!
Conclusion
Photo: XP-Pen
The XP-Pen Artist 12 Pro is an excellent purchase for a first-time pen display buyer like me and for beginner illustrators who just want the same natural feeling you get when you draw on paper.
Despite the minor parallax issues and somewhat inconsistent performance on different programs (who knows, maybe I was just unlucky with SketchBook), I still think you get the most bang for your buck with the Artist 12 Pro.
You get almost the same features and performance as a Wacom tablet. Granted, the Artist 12 Pro can’t top what a Wacom Cintiq has to offer (yet), but it still gets the job done with its clean lines, lots of shortcut keys you can customize, and the additional accessories for a reasonable price. That in itself is impressive to me.
Many of the reviews I saw said other tablet manufacturers such as XP-Pen and Huion are quickly catching up to Wacom in terms of quality and performance, and I agree with them. You couldn’t say the same thing five years ago, but tablet technology has come a long way since then. Pair that with a healthy competition among brands/companies and at the end of the day, us consumers win.