A couple of years ago, you might remember my review of the Wacom Cintiq 22HD. It was not a review unit. I was originally saving for the Cintiq 24HD until the 22HD and the 24HD Touch were announced. At that point, I was making decision whether to upgrade to the 24HD with a touchscreen for Windows 8 development, or save some money and get the 22HD. If you have read my many editorials on Windows Store certification requirements, you might guess that, at least I believe, I made the right decision.
Image Credit: Hack a Day
This purchase was actually the second graphics tablet that I owned. Years earlier, I purchased an Adesso CyberTablet 12000 but had problems with drawing in one location and seeing the results in another. I, then, transitioned to scanning pencil-and-paper and inking/filling them with a mouse. It was at that point that I took a gamble on a Wacom Cintiq.
Why am I telling this story? Wacom Cintiqs are based on the same technology as their Intuos tablets, even down to pen compatibility, with a display built in. Well, at Hack a Day, one of their clever readers decided to make their own Cintiq out of what appears to be a Wacom Intuos3 A5. Basically, he fit a replacement 9.7-inch, 2048×1536 display, designed for Retina iPads and similar tablets, behind the touch sensor. It apparently worked without much fuss.
You can find Wacom Intuos3 6 x 8-inch pen tablets for about 120-150$ used. You can also find a 9.7-inch 2048×1536 panel and the other necessary hardware for about $70. While it is not an exact replacement for a Wacom Cintiq, it is the best you will do for under $250 (or even under $900).
With the prices of the Wacom
With the prices of the Wacom Cintiqs, someone should build a decent graphics tablet based on Nvidia’s Tegra K1, for better graphics than Intel provides. Nvidia should be demonstrating a reference graphics tablet, along with the gaming tablets at the trade shows. Nvidia, as well a AMD could be producing some competition for Intel in the graphics tablet market, If Apple can get an OSX based Pro tablet then all bets are off, for android, and windows based tablets, if an Apple OSX device can run on the ARMv8 instruction set architecture, an Apple A8 based tablet, and the PowerVR wizard GPU with hardware ray tracing, would own the graphics tablet market.
Any info on the project tango screen resolution, or its ability for tasks other than 3D scanning?
Well, the point of a graphics
Well, the point of a graphics tablet is to hook into the desktop (or workstation) GPU. They are glorified monitor/mice hybrids, not computers.
As for "Project Tango"? Nothing yet.
Considering the games
Considering the games demonstrated on the K1, I would not be surprised if it could handle some Gimp and Blender 3D mesh modeling(not high end rendering as that could be done on a workstation/desktop/laptop), I am sure the Blender 3D edit mode would run just fine, and maybe some not so shabby cycles rendering on those K1 kepler GPU cores. I would love to have a K1 based graphics tablet for 3D mesh modeling and Gimp graphics, and the K1 supports the full desktop versions of OpenCL, OpenGL, so who knows, it would take a full Linux distro to run Blender and Gimp, at least the porting of these applications would not be impossible, the Denver K1 cores could handle 64 bit Linux. Hell I have used the Blender 3d node editor to composite single .png images for effects that can not be achieved in Gimp alone, and a K1(hopefully Denver core) should be able to run both Blender 3d and GIMP just fine, should there be any full Linux based tablets based on the K1.
If Apple could get an A8 based pro tablet to market running OSX then Blender 3d and Gimp would work on that also, I am hoping for an A8 based pro tablet, with that PowerVR wizard, and having hardware based ray tracing on the GPU will negate any need for a powerful CPU on a tablet for some serious graphics(non gaming) rendering, ray tracing being the reason for having a powerful CPU in the first place for rendering(Ray Tracing workloads).
With all the “rendering in the cloud” services offered, maybe a tablet for 3d mesh modeling, bump mapping, texturing/development, scene composition, etc. along with graphics drawing/whatever, then send the render grunt work to a cloud service render farm and do without the need for any server/desktop/laptop hardware. Nvidia seems to be heading that direction, with their GPUs providing the cloud servers/render farms. Personally I would love to have my own desktop system that could offer wireless streaming/rendering services to a Tablet for the graphics rendering grunt work, then I could take the tablet anywhere in the house and work with the graphics composition/3d mesh modeling.
For the Home the next killer application is the ability to stream/share/multiprocess workloads(gaming or otherwise) between tablets and home servers, freeing the users to operate off of tablets as their main computing device. Apple would be smart to take the Mac Mini to the next level and allow it to utilize this server function, and maybe give the Mac Mini a battery, and offer this as a mobile pair along with one or more iPads, the mac mini able to run in low power mobile mode, and high power mini desktop mode when plugged in. Home streaming/workload sharing between graphics tablets to home servers would get my money(the Philip J. Fry way) in a New York nanosecond, as long as I can 3d mesh model and compose scenes/graphics on the tablet and utilize the server for the heavy lifting/assisting. Apple did demo something similar at their latest development conference, AFAK. iPads and Mac Minis able to pair and share workloads would get people lining up for sure, especially if the Mac Mini had Mobile/powered capabilities and an automatic wireless multiprocessing with an iPad/s.
“graphics tablet is to hook
“graphics tablet is to hook into the desktop”, fine, great job pimping the Intuos with an LCD.
I have a Bamboo, but want a low cost self contained graphics tablet( running Its own SOC), with streaming/workload sharing either online cloud based or to a home server via Wi-Fi(gigabit). An ipad/android tablet paired with a home server or cloud service(render 3d scenes), should not be too difficult with the new tablet SOCs Nvidia/AMD/Apple.