Graphic tablets are essential tools for photographers who do retouching or edit a lot of photos. Adding a graphic tablet to your workflow makes your job that much easier, introducing natural feel to your editing process. There is nothing like retouching a photo of a model as if you’re simply tracing on his/her face without the restriction of a cumbersome mouse. Wacom has been the industry standard for pen input systems for creative professionals such as Graphic Designers, Comic Book Artists and Photographers. As a matter of fact Todd McFarlane who created Spawn and is one of the best Spiderman artists of all time is really attached to his.
I recently lost my old Wacom Bamboo Tablet (R.I.P. old friend) that I used for most of my editing. The pen died and since it’s no longer being produced, I couldn’t replace the pen. My first thought was to buy the Intuos Pro, Wacom’s top of the line tablet offering, however the US$400 price tag was a little much for me at the time. So, I started searching for alternatives that wouldn’t leave such a big hole in my pocket.
I came across a company called Huion that offered similar products for a fraction of the cost and when I say a fraction, I mean less than a quarter of the price. I decided on the Huion 1060 Pro Graphic Drawing Tablet which has a 10″ x 6.25″ drawing surface (The tablet is literally the size of my 15″ Macbook Pro) and only costs US$86.99 on Amazon (now on sale for $66.99 as of the writing of this article). I was amazed at the price and honestly a little worried that I was getting an inferior product since and 8″ x 5″ tablet usually costs more than US$150. So let’s take a look at the 1060 Pro.
Design
The Huion 1060 Pro is a beast of a tablet. It literally matches the Macbook Pro 15″ (Non-retina) in size although it is way thinner. It is made of a really good quality black plastic and has a fairly sturdy build. I could help comparing it to my Bamboo, which is just as tough. The buttons are easy to press and not too firm to the touch.
Features
The 1060 Pro has all the features that make good tablets good tablets. It trumps all the tablets on the market as the first with a micro sd slot for storing your designs. It’s as easy as creating a design in your favourite graphics program and saving to the card using Finder or Explorer. The included card is only 4GB but can be upgraded to 64GB which is lots of space for most designs. As soon as I plugged in the tablet the SD Card popped up on my desktop and was ready to go. The card slot proved a little quirky as insetting and removing the card was difficult because the slot recedes to far into the table body. A pen tip or something of a similar nature is definitely required to do the job. 2048 levels of pen pressure provide an as good as pen to paper performance, which you can adjust from the tablet control panel. I was able to test the tablet for doing general cursor functions, signature signing and drawing, all of which are just as good as the Wacom equivalents.