Product Reviews

Continuing the Graphire tradition, Wacom has released the latest version of its popular pressure-sensitive pen and tablet line, the Graphire 4 Studio XL. This is a well-proportioned graphics tablet: its active area is just a few millimetres narrower than A5, which translates well to most displays, including the 20in model used in our tests.

When you've finished the installation, there's an interactive tutorial to introduce you to the finer points of using a pen and tablet.

The Mac OS recognised the tablet for use with Inkwell, its system-wide handwriting-recognition software, but most users will put this product to work in graphics applications. Photoshop is, of course, the most widely used program that offers pressure-sensitive pen support, and the Graphire 4 excels with this and other pressure-savvy applications.

The tablet includes a pair of what Wacom calls ExpressKeys and, between them,

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a tube-like scroll wheel. The ExpressKeys act as the forward and back buttons in web browsers and in the Finder, but they're highly customisable using the System Preferences panel. The options range from sending keystrokes or acting as a modifier (any combination of shift, alt, control and command) through to launching a specified application.

The screen area is mapped to the tablet automatically. Our two-monitor setup required a simple adjustment of the software so that it worked in just one display. The options are the whole display area, a specific monitor or a designated part of the screen. The latter can be handy when drawing or painting intensively, as it lets you prevent accidental clicks outside your canvas. As usual, the active area in the tablet is a fair bit smaller than the whole tablet surface. It's marked clearly in the clip-on perspex overlay, but not on the tablet's surface. Still, the overlay isn't designed to be left off, just removed, while images to trace are placed underneath. This is all fine, but if the document is larger than the tablet, you'll need to trim or fold it because of the overlay's sides.

Some users take to using a pen like a duck to water, even ditching their mouse entirely, while others find it best reserved for actual graphic input. We wouldn't recommend switching to the Wacom Graphire 4 Studio XL if you spend your time writing documents or calculating spreadsheets. If you enjoy graphics applications, though, it should be on your shopping list.