FB Pixel

Wacom One Creative Pen Display – Is it good for photographers?

Wacom One Creative Pen Display - Is it good for photographers?

The Wacom One Creative Pen Display is a new product from the company, that’s an entirely new category for them as well. Wacom has always produced screenless tablets for artists. They also have their Cintiq line of large displays which are typically quite expensive. The new Wacom One Creative Pen Display is a small, portable, 13″ screen that has built-in legs and packs a powerful punch in such a small package. It might be the perfect Wacom tablet for any photographer of any level. Side note: I mentioned I was using an Intuos 4, but I was wrong. It’s an Intuos 5.

Transcription was done by Descript‘s automated transcription services which means it’s an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar, and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video.

Before we get into this review. I just want to apologize real quick because I’m trying, I was trying a different camera angle and I, right now I’m trying a whole nother camera angle and I think what was happening was the camera kept focusing on the pictures behind me, so the focus kept coming in and out. I could do a whole nother take of that, but it was my natural reaction unboxing this and starting to use it for the first time. So I feel like it was more important to keep the natural reaction in the video in this review than it was to make sure that the focus on me was perfect. So don’t worry about that. I apologize for it. Let’s get into this review.

For many years I have been using Wacom tablets. That’s these tablets that you use a pen like this and you can write on and you can edit your photos and I don’t know if you can tell on on camera, but mine is very worn out. This is the Intuit large. This is an older model. This is the first model. They went touchscreen. I can click one of these instinct keys and make the whole tablet become touch and I can move my mouse and use my fingers if I want to. I never do that. Actually. I never do that. I, I always use a pen. In fact, I use this pencil much that it’s actually my mouse. I don’t use a standard mouse. I use one of these and I use it so much that two things have happened over time. One is this pen is on its last leg.

I would go right and then the, the little nibs, these little tips and the actual, the little ring that keeps them in place, they fall out. That’s how use this pen is. And the other thing is there’s actually little divots in the tablet itself that I sometimes hit. And then I jump on a screen, which can be not the greatest thing when you’re trying to edit a photo and then you jump and then you’ve got to start from scratch. Let’s say you’re doing some cloning or something like that. Welcome to send down to the welcome one. And I have the honor and pleasure and I’m very delighted to be able to open it up and share my thoughts on it. For photographer. Now this is not a Cintiq. The interest line is the one that I just showed you, that black sort of graphite looking a charcoaly tablet that is, there is no display.

It is literally just a tablet and there’s some buttons on it that you can do some quick functions on it and you can program it to do a variety of different tasks and even on the pen which has no battery, which is amazing. You also have a bunch of buttons that you could do. You’ve got an eraser button, you’ve got some two quick on up and a down button here and you can do a bunch of things and again, no batteries, which is absolutely amazing. Every time walking comes out the new product, they increase an increase. The sensitivity levels at this point in time. All welcome products are so sensitive that it’s natural, so whether you go with one of their lower end products which have a lower sensitivity rate, still going to be very realistic. You’ve got to be doing some really intense drawing illustrations to really feel the difference between a lower end with a lower sensitivity, a pressure sensitivity really versus a high end sensitivity.

This anticline is actually a giant screen that can be angled in different ways. Similar to the look of the Microsoft surface. In fact, the Microsoft surface, their big screen really got their design from Watkinson teak. Those products are amazing. I have gotten to play with them at different trade shows, but they’re also quite pricey, but welcome has done is they’ve come out with the Wacom one. It is a creative pen display just like all the Wacom products. The pen is actually battery free. I actually do not believe there’s any buttons on on the pen. I’ll check as I opened this up. Now this is not a 4K screen. It is an HD screen. It is a 1920 by 10 80 screen, like this antique line. It does have a standard built in. It doesn’t go up as much as as this antique is just enough to give you that little bit of a tilt.

It’s that little bit of a three inch incline or something like that. What is really cool about this is it works on both Mac windows end. If you have an Android device, it’ll even work on an Android device. Now the screen is not shiny like the Syntex. It is actually a sort of matte textured screen. It’s supposed to be, which I’ll find out in a little bit as well, but it is supposed to have a more natural drawing feel to it. Again, one of the reasons why I feel this might be more for designers and artists than photographers, so let’s open this up, have a look and see what is going on with this. I’m going to install it on my computer, on my Mac, and I’m going to see if I can use this as really a replacement for my intuition or is the screen aspect of it mean that I can really only use it for editing and not as a daily mouse type of use?

First things first is the actual, Oh yeah, it’s definitely a more textured screenless than the Cintiq. This is beautiful though. Wow, so the front is this beautiful screen. It’s very thin. It’s about the same thickness as my intuition. It has a little incline on its own, but then you can pop out these legs and now you’ve got even more of an incline right there. Size wise, this is actually a little bit smaller than my Intuos. It will take up a little bit less real estate, I think it’s actually a little bit bigger than the intuitive medium. I have the intuits large. If I was to ever replace my Intuos, I would get into this medium because I find that I don’t typically use the full large space. In fact, you can tell by looking at the Intuos that where all the lines are, the sort of imperfections in the, in the, in the cover on the, on the tablet you can see exactly where I’m spending most of my time here.

Is the pen wrapped beautifully? Oh, surprisingly, I wasn’t expecting this. There is a button here. I think it’s one button. It’s not an up or down. I think it’s just one button, but that’s okay. There is a nib in here and I’m assuming that nip could be replaced. I’ll have to see if there’s a nib replacement kit. Just like the Intuos, the intimacy line. Here’s the intuits pen. Inside of the stand there’s a bunch of nibs and you can replace the ELU nips. I purchase additional nibs and I don’t know if it comes with one yet. The pen is designed to go into this little sleeve, I believe, so you can store it like that and travel with this so the pen stays with the tablet. Unlike the, you know, the Apple pens and the and the, the mic, the surface pens where they magnetize to the tablet.

This actually just gets stuck in the sleeve. Makes a, I think that product design wise, it’s not ugly. It works less magnets. So in here is the cable system. One end of it, we have an HDMI and a USB. Both will be required of course, and the other end is a USBC and another. So HG mic goes into the tablet. You then use the power brick and that USB to plug it in for power to go to the computer. Then use HDMI and the regular USB. One thing I’ll be curious about is if I can use this as a standard tablet and not use I because that means I can use this as a mouse on a daily basis and then plug in HDMI whenever I want to use it as a screen. So let’s see how that goes too. By the way, the nib replacement kit is behind the leg on the back of here. You push this into pull out the nib and then you’ve got three additional nibs built into the tablet, which means you don’t have to carry around. Another thing like the Intuos in order to replace your nibs, it’s built into the display that is very smart.

What you’re seeing right now is the recording of the welcome one 13 inch tablet. And I have Photoshop open and the first thing I notice is that if I place my pen on top of the screen, I can actually see a gap between like the glass and the and the and the digital screen. It’s a little little strange to see that gap, but it’s not the end of the world. Let’s say we want to just go ahead and just do some, some digital painting, right? So I can go ahead and I can start doing that. I can go lighter so you can see there the sensitivity is working nice. I can actually do it for size or I can do for that. I can go ahead and right click and make the size smaller.

Now I’m not a digital paint, a digital artist, but I just want to show that you can’t actually do this. Now, what’s, what’s kind of bothering me and, and this is something that I think this anticline handles nicely or better potentially than this does, is this is designed really to be a mirrored display. I’m currently using it as a secondary display, which means I need to drag everything to this screen, which is kind of a little bit of a nuisance staff to do. So right now, for example, the color picker opened in another screen. So I have to drag it over here to grab the color I want and now I can start drawing with that, right? So I can do that. Look how, look how nice that that does it with the pressure sensitivity and the size, it works really well, right? So I can go ahead and change the color again.

I will say that wherever I push it is actually doing that perfectly right? I can blend the colors here, we can go ahead and choose another color. And again, I’m not an artist under having some fun here drawing with this. So in Photoshop, this would work really well. Of course it’s going to work really well. I mean it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a walk based screen topic. So there is nothing that can really be bad about it. I’m curious to see how it works in lightroom and again, I think if there’s a mirrored display he would work better, which I can mirror but that means that I have a, I have a second an external monitor and now have this one plugged in. So technically I have two external monitors and it’s dragging from one to the other to the other, right.

If this was a mirror display, whatever I opened on my main computer, it’s going to actually show on the screen on the welcome one as well. It’ll be mirrored identical, which also means that the pen becomes my mouse, but it’s also a screen in a mouse. So this is more of a tool for if photographers need to travel with a screen that you can actually draw on, do some editing on, no, I’m going to close up Photoshop and I’m going to open up lightroom and let’s see how that works as well. I will say it’s also really cool that I can actually use ScreenFlow and record my screen. Okay, so now I’m inside of Lightroom. I could, if I want to have lightroom on my main computer and use the secondary display option, which is actually up here and go to window and then secondary display.

But I want to be able to develop on this. So I’m actually loading layer, I mean here instead, which means I could actually use another one. I can use my laptop or the other external display I have as a larger screen. If I want to do that. Now I’m going to just just go in and let’s see how this looks. It’s a little too close. It’s back up. Now this is a smart, a smart image right now because I don’t have the hard drive plugged in, so I’m only looking at a smart image or I should say a smart preview inside of Lightroom. And now let’s say we want to remove some stuff or do some edits. So let’s say, let’s look here. Let’s say I want to remove that. So I’m going to go ahead and choose that. And let’s go down in size. I’m on not using my keyboard at all. I’m only using the display and good second hand

It’s also worth noting that as I go to the black, I’m the extra thing of fingerprints as well, which cause I’ve been touching it. So the screen was to be cleaned every so often, which is fine. This removes some stuff from the floor. Now I do in this photo have some local adjustments and see how that looks. Yeah, so the response is really nice. I’ve been, I’m, I’m pretty pleased with how the, it’s responding. There’s no delay at all. It sensitivity wise, it looks really good. You know, there is a slight delay. I do see you as I move the mouse up and down. There is a slight millisecond,

A fraction, fraction of a millisecond delay between where my pen goes and where the mouse pointer goes on the display, not the end of the world. You’re not going to be moving super fast when you’re drawing or when you’re doing some photo editing. So that’s not a big deal. This is the perfect screen tablet for photographers who need a screen for editing while they’re traveling. To my great delight, and I don’t know if this is a fluke, if Wacom intended for this to happen, but I just unplugged the HDMI after recording all of that and you know what happened, I can move my mouse with this. When the screens on and plugged in and the drivers installed and everything set up, I can move my mouse and the Wacom one acts as a standard walk them tablet. Well that was a pleasant surprise and now I have to go ahead and start testing this in that aspect.

So I’m about to open up lightroom on my computer. So right now I have light remote into the same photo is just editing before on the walk and display and now I have the Waka one plugged in with without HTMI and I’m going to test it as just a tablet that is like the Intuos because what this means is that what I just told you before about it only being good for travel photographers is nonsense. It means that now this can be used as a daily use thing. It can be used as a mouse, literally a mouse and with the screen doesn’t even go on the screens on. It’s just a black screen. Literally it’s a black screen. The power is on and that’s it. I even had the legs up and it feels good if I put the legs down. It’s definitely more like the intuitive, it feels far more like the intro. So let’s see. I’m going to just start. I’m going to play and see how this looks. Let’s do me a little bit. There we go.

It feels like the Intuos. It really does that texture. It feels good. Not looking at the screen, it feels more like the Intuos. And let’s say we go ahead and, and just, just for the sake of a, let’s make a new one and let’s just brush the mat a little bit. So the pressure sensitivity is not doing anything in lightroom right now. I’ll have to open up Photoshop again and see if it does anything there. Let’s lead all that. Let’s go back to Photoshop. It’s the pressure sensitivity in Photoshop is working with using it just as a tablet and not a screen. That means it’s exactly what I will be doing for the next while to see how it works in place of my Intuos I’m into a four Lara. That’s how old my intuition is. Pressure sensitivity is working.

So I take it back. The Wacom one, if you need a pen display for on the go or at home and you don’t want to buy us in teak and you want it to not only be a standard tablet for regular use, but with the flexibility of having a screen for when you need it. The walking one might be my choice over an entire [inaudible] at this point in time. Now the penalty has one button where the [inaudible] has to, I will say I rarely use the second button on the Intuos. I do have it programmed. There are no express keys like the interpose has, but you can actually buy an additional device that adds buttons to do stuff with the product that you can program to do different things. If you really need to. To me, between having a keyboard and the mat and the, and the tablet, I can do everything I need to, so I don’t mind it. I’m curious to see, I’m going to be using this all day. I’m going to see if it gets hot, but right now it doesn’t seem like it’s going to, so that’s nice.

Share this with friends:

Join the Community

Sign up and join the thousands of other photographers on your journey to success. be the first to know about fresh content, special offers and so much more.

What's your name?
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.


The Workflows Photography Podcast

Workflows is a photography podcast about saving you time and money in your photography business. Tune in to hear stories, strategies, and tools that can be your rock.

Photo Breakdown Podcast cover image

Ever wondered what photographers really think about the latest gear, trends, and the stories behind their favorite shots? Photo Breakdown takes you behind the lens and into the minds of today’s top photographers, offering bite-sized episodes packed with insider insights, gear debates, and industry buzz.

Comments

381 responses to “Wacom One Creative Pen Display – Is it good for photographers?”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *