XP-PEN Artist 12 Pro 11.6" HD IPS Screen 8192 Level Stylus Pen with Tilt and 8 Shortcut Keys - Compatible with Mac, Windows

Product Information

On MacOS, drawing performance is consistent with pressure and tilt sensitivity working well with all the drawing apps I've tested. As there is no rubber on the bottom lip of the stand, if you lean very heavily on the top half of the tablet, the bottom part of the tablet will dislodge itself causing the tablet to slide off the stand. As you can see in the picture above, the pen tip is really close to the cursor, with big reductions made to the thickness of the glass using the fully-laminated display.

Factory calibration can only last so long before the monitor colours start to drift and become less and less accurate, so it is extremely beneficial in the long run if you invest in a colorimeter.

It also comes with a protective film to help protect your screen and reduce glare, while the pen holder keeps your pen and pen nibs safe and doubles as a pen stand or pen holder. for shortcut keys on a tablet was with the old Wacom Cintiq 22HD which has a touch bar on the backside of the tablet, behind the shortcut keys.

These shortcut keys also have anti-ghosting capabilities, meaning you can press multiple buttons at once and have them all work, the same way pressing multiple keys on a keyboard activates all of them at once. Compared to the Artist 12, the Artist 12 Pro features 8 fully customizable shortcut keys and puts more customization options at your fingertips! With this bad accuracy issue, the Artist 12 Pro felt quite cumbersome to use for detail work and I believe this is an issue which absolutely needs to be fixed if XP-Pen wants this tablet to be considered a “Pro” tablet as its name would imply.As a frustrated illustrator, it has always been my dream to have my own pen display tablet because years ago I was fascinated about the idea you could draw on a monitor as if you were drawing on paper (this was around 2003 when large, portable touchscreen devices weren’t that many yet).

However, my reviews and recommended products are not influenced by this, I’ll only recommend what I use and what I believe is good. In terms of animation scrubbing, I have never considered the differences in usage of the touch bar vs the dial when it comes to animation because I do not do animation myself, but that is certainly a use case where the dial seems much more natural to use than a touch bar. Wacom’s low-end Intuos tablets do not offer you the pen pressure graph, and none of the Wacom alternatives aside from XP-Pen offer it either! The “hints” also only show up on your main screen, not the screen assigned to your tablet, so they don’t help you figure out what function your red dial is on at all since you can’t see the hints on the right screen anyways. Parallax is non existent because the display is laminated and there's almost no or no gap between the glass and the actual display.

For my pen tests, I always start out with a few pen pressure scribbles to see if I can do some nice squiggly lines with increasing pen pressure. My recommendation for the best cheapest option is the Datacolor Spyder5 Express paired with the free software DisplayCAL. This is meant to show that it’s certainly a noticeable issue, but the tablet is still usable and should not be counted out completely. Brightness was measured at 190nits which is sufficient for indoor use but definitely not bright enough for outdoor. Simultaneous digital inking with an XP-Pen graphics tablet compatible with Microsoft Office apps like Word, PowerPoint, OneNote and more.