Wacom Intuos 4

Mike McNamee tries the new super-sensitive pen and tablet and is hugely impressed.

At the outset I was of a mind to say that one of the problems that Wacom has is that its gear never wears out and that the changes between models are quite subtle, leaving less of a driving force to upgrade. The Intuos 4 breaks that pattern, this one is such a leap forward that regular tablet users might easily be tempted to upgrade. And it's not just about the headline numbers, Wacom has been doing some serious talking with professional users and come up with some cool and inventive modifications.

The first thing that you notice is that the button set is along one side only. This is good news, the two sides of the Intuos 3 were a bit of a trial, I was forever brushing my wrist over the scroll bit on the right and causing unexpected things to happen. Do not panic if you are a leftie, the tablet is reversible so you can have buttons either side. You can even decide which of the four corner locations you wish to plug in your USB lead – trailing leads on a desk are a pain, so this is a real bonus!

So far so good, what else is new? Well the pen has an extra increment on its bit-depth, so that you now have 2,048 levels of sensitivity. And sensitivity is the word, it is feather light to the touch and requires a mere gram of pressure to get things moving. The finer pen-point is also a bonus, it seems to glide over the tablet surface more easily, although they do wear a little on the end – they can be replaced in seconds though, and spares are stored in the base of the new holder-cumdocking pot.

ABOVE: The sketching tools in Microsoft Journal provide all the usual marks such as red-lining, marker pens and sketching. The Wacom pen is easy to write with and the text may be translated into typed text for the Clipboard.

ABOVE: The Editor's scrawl was reasonably well interpreted but there were still nine errors in 64 words, along with an inability to decide where paragraph returns and sentence starts were.

Different features will catch the eye of different users but we loved the new Speed Ring. With a gesture of your spare hand/finger you can zoom your image, change brush size, rotate your art board (in CS4), or scroll. The ability to change brush size so readily is the real gem of this feature.

The Express Keys provide additional functionality so that you can toggle between multiple displays and, most usefully, drop the pen into 'precision mode' for doing really fine and fiddly bits of masking. The bottom set of Express Keys operates the modifier keys (Ctrl, Alt, Shift and the Grabber Hand). In addition there are masses of opportunities to customise the settings, one reason why the manual extends to just over 100 pages.

Above - The Intuos 4 in use. The left-hand finger is changing the size of the brush according to the area that is about to be masked. Sliding the finger around the wheel is far faster and easier than using the traditional shortcut of the bracket [ or ] to change the size and the Wacom pen never needs to leave its position on the image.

In use, the Intuos 4 does not disappoint, we found it better to use than all previous models and adapted to it instantly, using just the default settings.

Noting that Wacom mentions using Microsoft Journal we set about

ABOVE: The Express Keys are lit up with their function.

testing it. Was this something we were going to like about Vista at last? Well, as a sketching tool with a few bits of hand-written text and the ability to email your jottings, it was quite impressive. With Vista, though, there is always a sting in the tail. Selecting was a nightmare, at one stage the pen had to be a full four inches away from the target area on the screen to encircle it and we then ran out of space to get right across the screen view so we could select text. Using 'select text' grabbed all the hand writing and we then tried the interpreter. Without any training this made eight errors in 64 words. As with speech recognition, only words that are in the dictionary are offered and so the spell-checker always returns 'no errors' even when syntax is obviously wrong and a sentence may be gibberish. Paragraph returns are not obeyed either, so it is no use for continuous text without a bit of faffing about. As far as we can tell the main use might be for explaining a briefing problem or trying to devise a brief interactively and over the internet. Using it as a 'typist' would require more training effort and the hand-writing of a nonjournalist.

Overall

You will have gathered from the tone of the write-up that we liked Intuos 4 quite a lot! It was good to find things working effortlessly without having to grind through a complex set of installation and preference settings. Vista, bless its cotton socks, even got most of the twin screen set-up worked out without intervention. The options that toggle are left screen, right screen or both screens. It would pay to spend some time optimising the working areas although we got by without changing from default. Incidentally all the Open GL stuff of CS4 worked well and we found no compromises due to using the extra sensitivity of the new pen. Artists will love the ability to flick the art board in Photoshop; it is probably as easy as moving a sketch pad about on a desk and you don't send the coffee cup crashing to the floor!