Graphics tablets offer a natural alternative means of interacting with your computer. While popular with graphics designers and other design applications, these tablets have generally been rather expensive and out of reach to casual users. Wacom themselves have produced some of the most widely adopted tablets in the design industry, but have now released the Bamboo models targeted at the consumer market.
The Bamboo tablet is a passive-pen device that uses induction wave technology, eliminating the need for any batteries in the pen. With an active surface area of 5.8” x 3.7”, the Bamboo is smaller than professional tablets, but much larger than cheap ‘digital writing’ devices commonly sold for Chinese language applications. An 8”x5” version is also available.
The pen has both drawing and erasing ends that each detect up to 512 levels of pressure. This gives you great flexibility and control in drawing/photo applications such as Photoshop. There are also two click buttons that you can assign to various functions like mouse-clicks or keyboard shortcuts. On the tablet itself, there are four additional shortcut keys you can customize. Between these buttons and above the writing area is a round touch-pad you can use to zoom and scroll pages.
The new Wacom Bamboo tablet provides a much better feature set than the earlier bare-basic Graphire models and even cost less. While it is obviously mostly used in design work, the tablet also worked very well as an everyday replacement of your standard mouse. All this at a very affordable asking price.
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