Buzz will likely end up going the way of Google Wave, but part of me is convinced Google could actually pull off a much stronger social network then Facebook if it just understood how to integrate it’s services better; namely YouTube, which despite being linked to my Google account still has plenty of faults that prevent it from reaching the less tech-savvy majority who can’t work with video.

YouTube is to Google what Flickr is to Yahoo.

I included the template PNG

                          

BACKGROUND
A few years back I was handling in-house gaphic design work as a small part of my internship, it was here where I fell in love with art & design and decided to buy my first tablet (an Intuous 3). It served me faithfully for a few years, but it’s shortcomings were becoming more apparent as I started moving into more proffesional illustration. Foremost, was the problem of drawing while looking at the screen, I could never adjust to it, and consequently it prevented me from doing initial sketches on the computer and forcing me to rely on my scanner to import my drawings for inking and coloring.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I got my Cintiq last January. The hefty price tag of $1,300 was less intimidating since I’d just gotten a better job and – it being a few days Christmas – thought it’d be alright to treat myself to a fancy new toy. I bought it through a local computer retailer “MicroBytes” (Best Buy didn’t carry it and wouldn’t order it.

Even though I’d only got the 12inch screen model, I could tell right away it was perfect for most of the work I did, any larger would have made it unwieldy. People who work in production focused illustation may benefit from a larger screen size, but if your like me and are using it more to support a hobby, 12 inches should be fine.

The next things I encountered were the cables and “box thingy” which would be the intermediary device between the tablet and the computer. It was straightforward enough to setup, but it made me feel far more tethered to my desktop then I would have liked.

Windows 7 recognized it as a Wacom tablet but the driver it installed seemed to be fairly generic, I still needed to visit the Wacom support page to get the correct driver.

HOW IT HANDLES
Both the stylus and tablet were comfortable and felt natural to work with, complaints I’d read on YouTube about the slippey surface of the screen were unfounded and just as stupid as most YouTube comments. The screen did have a tendency to get a bit dirty after a few days of having my greasy paws all over it, but having a microfiber cloth handy is all you need for that.

Their was a slight discrepancy in the location of the cursor and the tip of the stylus (we’re talking maybe a millimeter or two) that required adjustment, but even before I calibrated to remove it, I hardly noticed it after a few minutes of sketching.

Both sides of the tablet have buttons & a touchstrip. While assigning hotkeys to the buttons has helped my workflow considerably, I disabled the touchstrips out of frustration, their positioning made them easy to hit. It might be an unfair criticism since I usually draw on the tablet while lying down which few artists I know do, it still caused a lot of annoyance.

CONCLUSION
For the past year I’ve used the Cintiq almost everyday, and find myself picking up my sketchpad less and less. While I’m not convinced it will completely take paper out of my workflow, it’s been a huge post to my productivity and helped me explore more advanced techniques. A definite buy.