The mysterious Wacom Intuos 4, the graphics tablet which shipped before even turning up on Wacom’s site, is finally, officially, official. What’s more, Wacom worked closely with the folks at Adobe to make sure the new tablet plays nice with Photoshop. Actually, really really nice with Photoshop.
The Intuos 4 has a bunch of hardware changes. The first thing you’ll notice is the swapping out of the old control strip for a new wheel called the TouchRing. According to Adobe’s John Nack, this was changed on Adobe’s say-so. He quotes Wacom’s Joel Bryant:
One direction that was totally changed based upon Adobe feedback was using the Touch Ring vs. the existing Touch Strip design (customer research had them with even preference). From the Adobe perspective, the Touch Ring fit much better with the CS4 Rotate Canvas feature especially. So we actually made that change directly based on Adobe feedback.
The other big change is the surface, which is widely reported to feel much more like using a pen and paper (I actually hacked my old Graphire 2 tablet to do this by taping a sheet of paper over the top. It worked great, although the nibs wore down very fast).
The pen is new, too, and will only work with the Intuos 4. It has the familiar two buttons on the barrel and now senses 2048 levels of pressure, all of which can be used by Photoshop. Finally, the new “ExpressKeys" have OLED displays to let you know what they are programmed to do.
On the software side, Wacom has added pie menus to the lineup. Press a button on the stylus and a circular menu, like a pie-chart, pops up at the cursor. This is a very fast and efficient way to select tools as it is both right by the mouse pointer and takes advantage of positional muscle memory. Nice.
The tablet now has an official price, too. The small tablet will cost you $230, medium $350, large $470 and XL $790.
Product page [Wacom] New Wacom Intuos4 rocks! [John Nack]
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