Wacom Bamboo Fun (geekery)
So anyway, now I have a tablet which is a reasonable size to draw while I'm watching TV or at a coffee shop or whatever. So I figure I should give a brief review.
First off, I can't believe I forgot to order more stroke nibs while I was already paying for shipping on stuff. Oops.
Anyway. The Bamboo line is sort of in between their low-end Graphires and the high-end Intuoses (or whatever the appropriate plural is for that). The pen is lighter than the Intuos, and doesn't have a removable/replaceable soft grip or button, BUT the grip is soft unlike the Graphire. All in all it feels like a nice balance. Also, the pen holder (which, like the Intuos, is separate from the tablet) is much nicer than the Intuos2's, and is this sort of disc-shaped thing with a notch so you can place the pen upright or on its side (that may be how it is on the Intuos3). And unlike any Wacom I've ever seen before, the USB cord is removable, with a standard mini-B connection, which makes it much easier to pack into a bag.
The driver is slightly annoying, in that it doesn't share the same one as the Graphire or Intuos. As a result, since I have the other driver installed on my laptop, I now have two Wacom control panels, one for "Pen tablet" and one for "Wacom tablet." I don't know why they draw the distinction between them; the main difference is that the "Pen tablet" one isn't nearly as flexible or configurable as the "Wacom tablet" one. Notably, there's no per-application configuration. However, ever since Wacom added the "pan/scroll" command, I haven't had any need for per-application configuration (since the only thing I ever used it for was to bind the rocker swich to 'space' in Photoshop, which ends up doing the exact same thing), so this isn't a huge deal to me. It might be a problem for some though.
Also, the Linux Wacom driver doesn't appear to support the Bamboo line just yet (although I didn't test it too thoroughly at work).
The tablet's texture is the nicest I've ever felt in a Wacom. There's no tracing surface (and the surface doesn't seem to be replaceable), but the texture feels like fine sketch paper.
I have absolutely no idea what the glowing ring around the zoom/scroll pad indicates, but it's a bit annoying to see it always pulsating out of the corner of my eye and there's nothing about it in the control panel. It seems to simply glow when the pen is active, and pulsate when it isn't. Hopefully a future driver update will allow that to be configured a bit more.
The scroll pad works fairly decently; click and hold it to scroll, and circle around to zoom. The scrolling feels a bit slow, but for zooming in Photoshop it's great.
Its pressure sensitivity feels about on-par with the Intuos2. It seems to provide samples at a much higher sample rate, too; when I draw curves quickly they're much smoother (although that could just be because I'm doing this on my MacBook, while I use the Intuos2 on my G5).
Size-wise it feels just about right. The active area is goes to about an inch from the edge, and its profile fits neatly inside the MacBook Pro's, so any bag which fits the MBP will easily accommodate the Bamboo Fun.
Anyway. If you want a decent-sized Wacom tablet, the Bamboo Fun so far seems like an excellent compromise between the Graphire and Intuos lines, and in some ways is even better than my Intuos2. If you don't need the size of the medium, the small has all the features and is about half the price. Also, you can usually save a bit of money if you buy one refurbished (which is actually what I bought), although availability is of course variable.
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