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Wacom
Graphire Power Suite
at a Glance
Maker:
Wacom
Price: $99
URL: http://www.wacom.com
Equipment
Used: G4 400; Mac OS 9.0.4.
Overall
Impression: This is a slick little pad that's clearly
bargain-priced. The Graphire tablets lack some of the features
of their more mature siblings in the Intuos line, but, for
the money, they do quite well.
Key
Benefits: With 512 levels of pressure, which can be
adjusted graphically along a curve in the Wacom Control
Panel, you can attain a lot of subtlety in your work. Plus
it comes with some pretty decent entry-level software and
utilities. The pen is comfortable, and the mouse is quite
nice, with three buttons and a scroll wheel. It's accurate
(1,015 lines per inch), and the driver is very fast.
Disappointments:
The pad has a small active area, which obviously makes it
less useful than some of the other pads on the market.
Recommendation:
Buy
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review
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NOVEMBER 17, 2000
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Wacom
Graphire Power Suite
Pressure-sensitive
tablet and graphics software package
The low
end of pressure-sensitive tablets sure has come a long way.
I remember my little ADB pad from back in the early '90s—one
of the first truly affordable pressure tablets. It was a great
idea, but it just wasn't all there. The sensitivity was too
sharp, and the driver was slow as the dickens. (Remember watching
Photoshop finish sketching your strokes 15 seconds after you
stopped drawing?)
The Graphire
Power Suite from Wacom has changed all that. Like the days of
old, the low end tablet still has a 4" x 5" active
area. But, besides the size, you get an outstanding set of tools
for the price—$99 including the pad, the pen, the cordless
mouse and a chunky software bundle.
Features
The Graphire Power Suite ships with Adobe Photoshop LE, Corel
Painter Classic, some handwriting notation software (a download
from the Wacom Web site for Mac) and the Wacom Control Panel.
The Control Panel is one of the most feature-rich I've seen
in a while, with six tab settings for the pen and four for the
mouse, each of which can be customized for individual applications.
The pen itself
is comfortable. In addition to the pressure tip, it has a double-ended
button that can be programmed for combinations of mouse clicks
and keystrokes, as well as an eraser on the end, which, just like
a pencil, can be tipped over to erase bitmap data in a graphic
(with pressure sensitivity) or text in a text editor.
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