Seems like
we're burning through the Wacom products here at Digital Media
Designer. We started off with the little Graphire 4" x
5" model, moved on to the monstrous Intuos 9" x 12"
and arrive today, finally, at the king of them all—the
PL500. This
is the tablet all reviewers dream of reviewing. For you see,
it is not merely a tablet. It's a pressure-sensitive, pen-based
LCD monitor. The drool factor on this puppy is quite high.
As I've
found, one of the biggest drawbacks of the PL500 is in the area
of productivity. To wit, it will be difficult to get any work
done while your envious colleagues are hovering around you trying
to get a glimpse and asking you all kinds of questions about
it. One helpful tip to get rid of them is to tell them the price,
at which point they start backing away in awe and fear, as if
it were some holy artifact ... which it is.
The PL500,
unlike its smaller predecessors (the PL300 and PL400), offers
24-bit color on a 15" screen (1,024 x 768 resolution).
It hooks up to your computer via a DVI port, such as those that
are included on the ATI Rage 128 cards included on Macintosh
G4s. (In case you're wondering, no, you can't use both ports
at once. If you want your regular monitor to work at the same
time as the PL500, you'll need to install a second card in one
of your spare PCI slots.) The monitor itself is one of the best
I've seen, with rich color and a viewing angle that doesn't
seem to quit. It's covered with a piece of actual glass—scratch-resistant,
of course—and you get an active tablet area of 11.9" x
8.9". (My particular unit had an acrylic cover, which I believe
was simply a refurb. I've used two other PL500s that had glass
covers.)
