Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch

About 12 years ago, I was very impressed with what we then called the “Wacom Tablet”, and we sold them together with very high-end Silicon Graphics workstations.  Although the price of the Wacom then was not considered very expensive when compared to the Silicon Graphics workstations, it was however, priced beyond the casual users’ affordability.

Recently, I was brought to the understanding that these “Pen Input” devices are reasonably affordable, and are priced around the same as high-end mice.  Of course, the first thing that came to mind was Wacom.  Off I went “shopping” for one thinking that it’s going to be affordable.  I then came across the brand Genius, which is quite a well known for input devices and the smaller units (3.5” by 5”) are priced around RM200-250 depending on where you get them and the medium sized ones (4” by 6”) are priced around RM300-350.  As the packaging of the devices are not that impressive, I held out on getting a unit as I wasn’t sure whether I needed it.

I then found a retail shop that sells Wacom devices and there was a unit that cost RM5,000++.  This is an impressive unit as it is actually also a screen and basically you can write and draw on it without needing to look at the monitor.  Anyhow, it is obvious that I am not going to spend that kind of money on an input device.  At the other end of the price range, they also had the Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch, which is actually a Pen input device with a Multi-touch surface that’s similar to those found on the Macbooks.  It’s priced at RM419!

The packaging of the device is quite impressive and gives the impression of a high quality product. The inside box (below), a very elegantly designed black box.

The content after the wraps were taken off.  Note, the wrapping method was also quite impressive.

The actual device itself is very thin!  I think slightly less than 1cm in thickness.

The “pen”.

 

The box containing the CDs.

Another picture of the main device.

I have yet to give it a try but the reason why I finally bought this device (with a slight discount) is that for photo editing, nothing beats using a pen type device (as oppose to a mouse or worse, a trackball!) and since I can’t yet afford a Macbook, this can act as a nice multi-touch for me to view my photos =)

I bought this in the All IT Hypermarket, top floor of the Digital Mall in PJ.