I’ve never had a nice drawing pad before, but I always wanted a Wacom to play around on since they were Linux compatible (and as easy as Bluetooth on Linux). I never had the money, but I took the jump on the Huion HS64. They have bigger ones and an even smaller one, but this seemed the perfect size for the area I have to work with.
Drawing tablets differ heavily from trackpads and mice due to the fact their positioning system is absolute rather than relative. This means that it is more like a sheet of paper than a mouse. The bigger the size, the more real estate to work with.
Features
The Huion HS64 is a 6″x4″ (15cm x 10cm) space roughly to work on. It has some kind of portrait cell phone mode on a portion of the canvas, but I don’t use it for mobile. I figured since it worked on Android, it worked on standard Linux, and I was right.
The sensitivity feels like some kind of rough paper. The pen doesn’t require a battery and there are 4 customizable buttons. It has 8,192 levels of sensitivity (which seems to be standard).
The device itself feels pretty hefty. The USB port is definitely tight and solid. The stylus is a bit light, but feels roughly like a larger pencil rather than a pen. It includes a bunch of replacement tips, a glove, and some other bits for cell phone usage.
How Well Does It Work?
Once I installed the module and restarted Xorg on my Debian machine, it worked great. I assume it’s roughly the same with every other OS it supports for driver installation. I usually experience some level of difficulty with new hardware due to the highly custom environment I run, but this was trivial even with it.
The pad itself is great. I played with it for a while and found it on par with paper for drawing. Unfortunately, my art skills are lacking, but I feel it’s just an easy way to digitize content rather than a new tool to learn. The learning curve is basically nonexistent after the driver and software portion. Now it just feels like the way to interact with most art programs.
The glove helps avoid smudges, but isn’t strictly necessary if you wash your hands before use and wipe it down after. I shift between my left and right hand and didn’t really notice a huge difference in tracking. I have heard this can be an issue with some drawing pads. The whole package feels well thought out and everything works well.
What Are the Caveats?
There are only a few, self-imposed caveats. The drawing area is relatively small. If you want to buy this, cut some paper to the working area of 6.3″x4″ and see how it feels. It works out to somewhere between a quarter and a third of a sheet of letter or A4 paper. This is a feature or a bug depending on what you’re buying it for.
You can get bigger drawing pads from the same brand here.
The buttons take a bit of work to get working in some environments. I don’t really care about them, but I plan to document what I found in an article in the near future. There are pads which do not include buttons though, and the buttons don’t really add a huge amount unless you want a few specific shortcuts. It makes a lot more sense on the drawing pads with many more though.
Conclusion
If you can live with the size, this is an amazing drawing pad (which is specifically what sold me on it). It has a few user programmable buttons, but not as many as some similar products (there are ones with 6 or more in a similar form factor). I felt like I was basically using paper when I got used to working with it. The whole package is affordable and the build quality is solid.
Get it here.