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Wacom Intuos 4 - part 3 of 1 2 3

by Mike McNamee Published 01/10/2009

The Express Keys are lit up with their function.

testing it. Was this something we were going to like about Vista at last? Well, as a sketching tool with a few bits of hand-written text and the ability to email your jottings, it was quite impressive. With Vista, though, there is always a sting in the tail. Selecting was a nightmare, at one stage the pen had to be a full four inches away from the target area on the screen to encircle it and we then ran out of space to get right across the screen view so we could select text. Using 'select text' grabbed all the hand writing and we then tried the interpreter.

Without any training this made eight errors in 64 words. As with speech recognition, only words that are in the dictionary are offered and so the spell-checker always returns 'no errors' even when syntax is obviously wrong and a sentence may be gibberish. Paragraph returns are not obeyed either, so it is no use for continuous text without a bit of faffing about. As far as we can tell the main use might be for explaining a briefing problem or trying to devise a brief interactively and over the internet. Using it as a 'typist' would require more training effort and the hand-writing of a nonjournalist.

Overall

You will have gathered from the tone of the write-up that we liked Intuos 4 quite a lot! It was good to find things working effortlessly without having to grind through a complex set of installation and preference settings. Vista, bless its cotton socks, even got most of the twin screen set-up worked out without intervention. The options that toggle are left screen, right screen or both screens.

It would pay to spend some time optimising the working areas although we got by without changing from default. Incidentally all the Open GL stuff of CS4 worked well and we found no compromises due to using the extra sensitivity of the new pen. Artists will love the ability to flick the art board in Photoshop; it is probably as easy as moving a sketch pad about on a desk and you don't send the coffee cup crashing to the floor!

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1st Published 01/10/2009
last update 09/12/2022 15:00:08

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