About a week or so ago, I posted this rant about my Wacom tablet drying and how bad non-Wacom tablets are and that one should never buy cheap tablets as they are a waste of money.
So now I bought a $55 tablet to replace my old $250 dead Wacom.
It's a Huion, a budget Chinese brand. Yeah, there's a sentence that inspire confidence.
Okay, it's not as good as a Wacom, but at a fifth the price, you wouldn't expect it to be.
The funny thing is, it's a lot better than what I expected for $55.
The pen is light (even though it requires a AAA battery) and drawing on the tablet does feels a bit too plastic for me, but the sensitivity response is good and ,surprisingly, the line control is very good. In fact, I don't need to have the stabilisation all the way up in Clip Studio to draw a straight line like I used to with my old Bamboo.
The tablet itself feels solid and well built with an active area of 10x6 inches. You get 8 programmable buttons which work OK except when you bind the move key in Clip Art (space), which seems to stop working after prolonged use.
The drivers are pretty basic but it gives you enough control over the essentials like screen ratio, pen pressure, programmable buttons and active screen.
For $55, I'm pretty sure the insides are held together with gum and spit. However, from other reviews I've read, Huion actually listens to feedback and work hard to correct problems. This is pretty impressive for a budget manufacturer.
What's more important, I have not heard many complains over the build quality of their product. In fact, I'll be hard pressed to recall a single one.
So far so good. Here's hoping it lasts me more than a week.
