General

Why not to buy the Wacom Inkling

[header]Why not to buy the Wacom Inkling: A critical review[/header]

Before that, for those of you who don't know what Wacom Inkling is, [url=http://www.wacom.com/en/Products/Inkling.aspx]educate yourselves.[/url]
[i]you can also follow this discussion in my news article on Deviantart:[/i] http://news.deviantart.com/article/160497/
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Upon further thought (probably too much thought) and some argume- I mean discussions with other people on Youtube, I've come up with what I view as significant reasons on why [b]not to buy Wacom Inkling.[/b] I was really excited about this product at first and it seemed like an amazing idea, but then I started to really think about WHY it could be useful and HOW it would be used.

Here is why I think that Wacom Inkling is probably not the most amazing invention in art and graphics:

[b]1) The tranceiver[/b]
Due to this product being wireless and using infra red, there is bound to be issues regarding the transmissions from the pen to the receiver. Wacom states that you must leave a 2cm gap between the receiver and the drawing to prevent loss of data. Not really a problem on A4 paper, but when drawing in say, a small moleskin sketchbook on the go, this takes away a significant portion of page room. You [i]could[/i] just place the receiver 2cm away from the sketchbook, but if it gets knocked or moved accidently, your drawing will come out distorted when you plug it into the computer. Not only that, but you probably won't be able to find an ideal flat surface to do this when you're on the go. Then there's the issue of, when you have nowhere to lean on to draw, the page bending backwards resulting in loss of transmission from the pen to the reciever or pictures coming out distorted. This may not seem as an issue if you have a thick sketch pad, but most cheap sketchpads only have 50-80 pages, and get quite flimsy when you're almost at the end of the sketchpad, or drawing on the left hand page at the beginning of the sketchpad. As an artist who draws a lot on the go, I rarely find that have somewhere to lean on to prevent this problem.

[b]2)How to hold the pen[/b]
In order to not lose any data being transmitted from the pen to the device when drawing, you have to hold the pen in a certain way (i.e. not near the pen nib). Personally, this is very uncomfortable when drawing tiny details in the sketch, where you need more control over the pen. Holding the pen further away from the nib increases the likelyhood of making mistakes (see the below point) because your control on the pen is inhibited.

[b]3) Making mistakes[/b]
May I point out another frustrating problem with this product; if you make a mistake in your sketch, you can't go back and erase it. You have to wait until you've finished the ENTIRE drawing, plug it into the computer, and THEN correct it. I don't know about other artists but that would really frustrate and distract me. NO ONE can always produce a 100% perfect sketch on paper, even if you draw pencil lines first and then draw over them in the Inkling pen. Your pen is bound to slip or you're bound to put a line in the wrong place somewhere.

[b]4) A cheaper alternative to the graphics tablet?[/b]
I doubt it. For a start, there are plenty of graphics tablets out there that are less than $200, and Wacom even has a few just slightly above $200. For the really low budget people, they work perfectly fine, if a little small. For high budget people, looking to replace a graphics tablet with Wacom Inkling is just silly. When you get down to it, graphics tablets and the Wacom Inkling aren't really comparable because they each do different things, and Inkling has a lot of limitations. For example, you can't colour with a Wacom Inkling, but you can easily do so with a graphics tablet and graphics software.

[b]5) An alternative to a scanner?[/b]
For a start, buying this as an alternative to using a scanner is just silly. You can get really cheap and good printer-scanners for less than $150 (May I just point at Kodak). Another issue with using it as a replacement for a scanner are the transmission errors listed above. However, one good point about using this as a scanner alternative is that you don't have to rip drawings out of a thick sketchbook just to be able to fit it in the scanner to transfer it to the computer.

[i]"But it turns everything into vectors!"[/i]
The fact that it turns everything into vectors doesn't eliminate the potential problems mentioned above. I would rather vector all my lines on the computer anyway (hell, it's really easy to do in Photoshop and PainToolSAI) than lose data on a sketch I spent ages on due to drawing too close to the receiver, or my lines being distorted, or accidently forgetting not to hold the pen too close to the nib, etc.

[i]"But vectors!"[/i]
Shush your tush.