Wacom Intuos3 6×11 Graphic Tablet

May 25, 2007 in Tools by Vyoma | 3 comments

The control you get when you use a pen or pencil – the physical ones – when compared to mouse, is in a different league altogether. That is unless you were taught to write using a mouse when you were a toddler. This is especially true, in case of working on artworks in computer.

I got myself a Wacom Intuos3 6×11 tablet two days back. As I set it up and began testing it, I could not help but whip out an artwork and post it.

Features

The Intous3 series is the better of the two series: Graphire4 and Intuos3. The basic differences between the two are the levels of pressure sensitivity and availability of tilt sensors. The Intous3 has double the pressure sensitivity of Graphire4 – 1024 levels as opposed to 512. Also Intuos3 has tilt sensors that are not available in Graphire4.

Wacom Intuos3 6×11

In terms of cost – Intous3 is much costlier than Graphire3. Hence, if your requirement of a graphic tablet is just to touch up photos, then Graphire3 should be more than enough. But if creating artworks from the scratch is on your agenda, you should go for Intuos3.

The Wacom Intuos3 6×11 comes with a battery less pen and also a five button mouse. The best part about a tablet – as opposed to other devices like touch screen is that graphic tablets eliminates the chances of unwanted inputs. (This was a major gripe for me with the laptop touch pad).

Hitches

I did face few problems when setting up the tablet with my laptop. I was running Windows Vista, and the drivers shipped along did not configure the tablet to its full potential. I had to download the latest drivers from Wacom site, and then it worked without any problem.

Also, I am not sure if it is me or just the tablet – the tilt sensors seem to be a bit jumpy. May be I need to configure it more, or I need more practice.

Addons

With the package, I did get addon software like Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Painter. I am not sure if I will be using them – I guess I will be sticking to GIMP and Inkscape – at least for a while.

Disclosure: The Amazon link above is a referral link.