This creative tablet is the best thing to happen to my photography
This creative tablet is the best thing to happen to my photography
‘ZDNET Recommends’: What exactly does it mean?
ZDNET’s recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing.
When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. Indeed, we follow strict guidelines that ensure our editorial content is never influenced by advertisers.
ZDNET’s editorial team writes on behalf of you, our reader. Our goal is to deliver the most accurate information and the most knowledgeable advice possible in order to help you make smarter buying decisions on tech gear and a wide array of products and services. Our editors thoroughly review and fact-check every article to ensure that our content meets the highest standards. If we have made an error or published misleading information, we will correct or clarify the article. If you see inaccuracies in our content, please report the mistake via this form.
This creative tablet is the best thing to happen to my photography
Wacom One tablet used to control Adobe Photoshop.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
Wacom has been the go-to name for drawing tablets for as long as I can remember (over three decades), and I’ve owned a number over the years. In fact, I still regularly use a medium-sized Wacom Intuos Pro drawing tablet, and find it super handy for working in Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere Pro.
Once you experience the precision and intuitiveness of using a pen rather than a mouse or trackpad — which all of a sudden feels very primitive — there’s no going back.
Also: The best stylus tablets for note-taking and drawing
But what about a drawing tablet that has a screen? I’d never used one before and questioned how much I’d get out of one.
But the Wacom One changed all of that.
ZDNET RECOMMENDS
Wacom One
High-definition creative pen display designed for creative hobbyists, visual thinkers, and anyone needing a second screen or bigger digital canvas for work or play.
Wacom One tech specs
- Size: 14.1 × 8.9 × 0.6 inches
- Screen resolution: 1920 x 1080 pixels
- Active screen area: 11.6 x 6.5 inches (13.3-inch diagonal)
- Connection type: Wired
- Pen: Pro Pen 2, battery-free, tilt-recognition
- Compatibility: Windows, MacOS, Chromebook, and select Android devices
In the box, you get the drawing tablet, a pen, a USB power supply, and a cable.
That cable connects to the tablet, the USB power supply, and a USB port and HDMI port on the host computer. One thing to note here is that the connector that connects to the computer is USB-A, so if your system only has the newer USB-C ports, then you’re going to need a dongle or dock — not really much of a showstopper since most creatives have plenty of them about.
Also: Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra vs Apple iPad Pro: Which flagship should you buy?
Once the drivers are downloaded and the tablet hooked up, it just works. It’s a painless experience, as it should be, but I’ve tried a lot of off-brand tablets and have been thoroughly disappointed by the sloppiness of the drivers, how much hand-holding the tablets needed to work, and how often they’d randomly disconnect.
If you’re buying a tablet, my advice is to buy a Wacom.
The pen is very nice.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
OK, back to the Wacom One.
The 13.3-inch HD display is very nice.
OK, it’s not as deeply detailed as the high-resolution displays you see on Macs and other systems, but still very functional. It’s bright, the colors vivid, and it’s the perfect balance between being big enough to get work done on it. But it’s not so big as to be unwieldy.
The surface of the tablet — the bit that makes contact with the pen — also feels nice. It’s less like using an Apple Pencil on the iPad, and more like drawing on paper. There’s a nice feeling to the interface between the two.
Also: The top stylus pens (and if they work for all devices)
I’ve been using a number of creative tools on it, and find it well-suited for things like drawing or image editing. I’ve also used it for video editing, and while Adobe Premiere Pro felt cramped on it, an app like LumaFusion — which is designed for the iPad — worked much better.
Yes, I used the Wacom One to edit videos.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET
The pen is also nice. It’s battery-free, which means it’s lightweight and nimble, and incredibly responsive. It offers 4,096 levels of pressure, and there’s a programmable side-switch to put shortcuts right at your fingertips.
Not sure what software to try? No worries! The Wacom One comes with some trial software for you to experiment with.
- Clip Studio Paint software for drawing and painting.
- Bamboo Paper digital paper notebook from Wacom .
- Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan .
- Adobe Fresco drawing software offers a large collection of vector and raster brushes.
The pen looks and feels like a professional bit of kit and even comes with some spare nibs in case you wear out the existing one (I don’t think I’ve ever done that) or damage it by dropping it (yeah, I’ve done that).
Also: This Wacom drawing tablet feels like putting pen to paper
Not a creative type? Then this is perfect for planning and sketching and taking notes. Anything you might do on the back of an envelope, you’ll do better using the Wacom One.
For a 13.3-inch drawing tablet that’s also a display, the Wacom One is competitively priced at $291. A jump up to the 16-inch Wacom Cintiq 16 will set you back $650, while a 24-inch Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 is $2,699.
A lot of creatives won’t get beyond what the Wacom One has to offer, and that means that it’s going to see years of use, which makes that initial investment an even better deal.
And again, you can find cheaper tablet displays, but in my experience, they’re a false economy that’ll put you off using your tablet.
Featured reviews
About The Author
Add a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.