Wacom Cintiq 12WX

Every designer at one time or another has wished that they could draw directly onto their monitor screen. Thanks to Wacom, the future of digital sketchbooks has arrived – but it’s going to cost you

The original Cintiq merged the responsiveness and pressure sensitivity of an Intuos tablet with a 21-inch monitor. This meant you could paint directly onto the screen, like a large digital sketchbook. The latest incarnation of the Cintiq, coming after a major rebranding of Japanese giant Wacom, aims to develop this digital sketchbook idea further, cutting down the size of the screen and effectively integrating a 12.1-inch widescreen LCD into an Intuos A5 Wide.

In principle this sounds fantastic, almost as good as the Cintiq looks and feels in fact. The top-notch build quality and beautiful screen make it a device that any designer would love to own. However, the fact that it has to be physically connected to your Mac or PC voids its portability. Though it’s vastly manoeuvrable, it’s always tethered, so you’re still not able to take your work to your boss’ desk.

The Cintiq 12WX hooks up to your computer by means of a small control box, which houses the DVI (or DVIVGA), USB and power connections. This enables you to adjust the display like you would a normal monitor. What we would like on this box is a button that turns the screen off completely, so the tablet can function as a normal Intuos . You can make it run as a normal Intuos by unplugging the DVI and recalibrating your stylus, but it’s a hassle.

On the subject of calibration, the usual bevy of controls are found in the Wacom driver. These enable you to program the ExpressKeys to be modifiers specific to your chosen app or workflow, as well as change the functionality of the Touch Strip. The Touch Strip, used as a Zoom tool, is absolutely brilliant for working on details in, say, Photoshop. Simply create a new view of your document for your Cintiq screen, and you can work on this close-up view while seeing how the rest of the image is affected on your main monitor. For this kind of workflow alone, a pro photographer or a designer entrenched in photography is going to adore the Cintiq 12WX.

At £829 it’s not cheap though. Whether you splash out depends on your need for painting directly on a screen – you could almost get a laptop and an Intuos A5 Wide for this price, which would offer more portability because the Cintiq requires its own power supply.

As a digital sketchbook, the new Cintiq is undeniably brilliant. It’s simple to set up (a few hiccups with display arrangement tested us, but we beat them easily) and wonderful to use. In fact, you soon forget that you’re actually drawing on a monitor. The surface has a paper-like resistance and the tweaked stylus is very easy to draw with.

Because it’s around the same size as an Intuos it’s very comfortable to work with for long periods, while the stand and the fact that you can swivel it as easily as a sketchbook make it extremely versatile.

The Cintiq 12WX has a few faults, but overall is an exciting development from Wacom. We’d like to love this, but as it stands we can only really see it as a very expensive, beautifully made digital sketchbook that is used at your desk. And you have to decide whether you have the budget to blow on such a luxury.