Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I purchased this from Wacom, not Amazon. Note: I use the device for drawing/graphic art. I do some photography on it, and do not spend any time editing videos on this device. Overall, it's a good device to draw with when it decides to work as intended. There are some really good highs and really awful lows to the device. Unfortunately, the flaws really hold it back when you consider the device is expensive and seems to be intended for professionals/ serious artists. Pros: - The matte screen is wonderful to draw on. It isn't slick and slippery and makes the drawing experience very pleasing. My MS Surface Pro was not as fun to draw on b/c of the slippery surface. I just hope the matte doesn't wear off over time from the constant rubbing of the pen/stylus. - The pen is amazing. It has a great quality feel. Everything works well. The eraser is rounded instead of flat so you can more accurately erase. It has a soft rubbery covering where you hold it and the pen is just fat enough to stay comfortable in your hand for hours. - The macro buttons are very useful and you can fully customize them w/ the Wacom software. A little popup shows in the upper left hand corner to tell you what shortcut you're using when u press a button. - The screen is great. The colors are accurate. The screen is bright. The resolution is very high. Touch works well 99% of the time. It's sometimes figity, but I've seen the same thing in other tablets. I think it's b/c Windows isn't completely optimized for touch. The pen works well w/ the screen, accurately and smoothly. - The charger cable is long enough for most uses, unlike the MS Surface Pro 1's cable. - You have multiple USB 3.0's, an SD card slot, and more. These are very convenient. - It works very well as a Cintiq when you plug it into your PC. This is a wonderful feature. I wish you could use it as a monitor as well, like some of other Wacom's devices. It could happen, but Wacom didn't include such capability this time around. Hopefully they will in the future. Cons: - It's too expensive. They offered cheaper versions this time around, but the processors included in the cheaper versions are very slow. I have the i5 and it lags really badly during certain things. When I increase the brush sizes in MS5 EX or Photoshop, there is some pretty awful lag. It's not noticeable during the early stages of a piece, but as you add a few more layers on and the canvas starts to get more complex, a large brush stroke could take 3 seconds to render. I haven't tried the other CPU's available, but my i5 is much too slow for the price tag. - Issues with drivers. Wacom's drivers aren't perfect, but they work for the most part. They look very dated and some features don't work well. The slides you can have to adjust brush tip size and zoom are very fidgity. But the worse part is the random loss of pressure sensitivity. This is clearly a driver issue and people have experienced this for years. Looking through the forums, I've seen many people having this problem and it goes back years. You'll draw in Photoshop and the pen will lose sensitivity and you'll get random lines of 100% pressure b/c the pen's sensitivity stops working randomly. I've found a fix for it by turning off the double click distance, but other people have found other fixes. Other people use different fixes, and most fixes don't help. I don't know why they haven't resolved this issue after so many years. Another huge issue is the pen completely stops working when I try to use it with Adobe Lightroom. It works for a few minutes, then the tablet stops detecting the pen. And it's not like it stops working for just Lightroom; the tablet stops recognizing the pen completely. Even when you close Lightroom, it doesn't come back. You have to restart the tablet for it to recognize your pen again. I'm forced to plug in a mouse to use Lightroom on this thing. As if not having a convenient way to use a keyboard wasn't bad enough, now I need to carry a mouse w/ me if I want to process some pictures in a standard program like Lightroom. You might think you could use the touch screen, but it's not good. The resolution is amazing, but in this case, the pixel density actually works against the touch screen: everything is so tiny, even very small fingers wouldn't be able to accurately hit things in Lightroom/Photoshop with ease. I suppose you could lower the resolution, but that's not a good solution. Wacom needs to resolve these problems. The pen and macro buttons are the only reason artists buy their tablets. - The charger isn't working. This is unacceptable. I've found that others have had this issue for years as well. They stated they fixed the problem in 2014, but now they're shipping chargers that don't work. It was working fine when I got it, but now it stopped. - The charger doesn't use magnetic attachment. If someone, or you, trips on the cable, it will yank your tablet off the table with it. Hasn't happened to me, but there's a reason why Apple use the magnetic chargers. MS Surface also uses them. - They put the Windows key sticker on the charger. This is a minor one, but the sticker will probably get worn down over time. I took a picture of it just in case. - The tablet is huge and heavy. Wacom's digitizer has always sucked around the edges. I've seen how bad it is on my MS Surface Pro 1. No matter how much you calibrate it, the pen and the digitizer will be off by as much as an inch near the edge of the screen. It's ridiculous. Their solution seems to be to make a huge digitizer and a small screen so that the edge of the digitizer goes off screen. This solution is like a joke. You end up with a 17 inch tablet with a 13.3 inch screen. I know some of that extra size accomodates the macro buttons, but it makes the tablet a giant for a small screen. This is such a sloppy solution. I'm just waiting for someone to come around and give us something better. - The fan is always on. Sometimes when the screen is off, the fan is still turned on and stays on for seemingly no reason. I don't even have programs open and it should be on sleep mode, but the fan is on. - The battery life is a joke. 4-5 hours max. Considering that the CPU isn't fast and the tablet is huge and heavy, I don't know why the battery life hasn't improved from the last generation. - No attacheable keyboard. Having to get another keyboard that doesn't attach is a pain. It's just another thing you need to use the device for anything other than drawing. The on screen keyboard provided by Windows is awful. If you need to type on this thing, you need a keyboard. I bought a small USB keyboard for it. They overcharge on the bluetooth one they sell. - Included case isn't that good. It's nice that they included a case, but it doesn't have a handle and the slots on the side don't have anything to hold things in place. If you hold it upside down, the pen case and keyboard will slide out. This isn't a big deal b/c they didn't need to include a case at all. - The stand is a joke. The way it's designed, no matter how high you raise the screen, the device always takes about the same amount of desk space. It takes up the entirety of any regular table space you get in a regular college. The stand falls off if you pick up the device and the thing is flimsy. It looks cheap and is cheap. This is the worse stand I've seen on any electronic. - There's no place to attach the pen to the device. Not the biggest deal, but it's inconvenient. The pen comes with a very nice case and has some extra tips and little rings to change color, but I'd trade all of that to have a way to store the pen inside the tablet. - The speakers suck. They put 2 speakers and it's stereo in the front, but they're awful. So quiet even when you have them on full blast. Sometimes, they'll randomly get really loud during certain portions of videos. Probably b/c they're capable of extreme loudness only for certain frequencies. I wish they would've put cheap phone speakers in and charged less for this beast. - The power switch takes a while to register. You can't just flip it. You have to hold it for 1 or 2 seconds. But if you hold it too long, it turns on and off again. What the hell. At least it turns on quickly. Honestly, I can live with most of these flaws. I found a fix for the loss of pressure sensitivity and they just need to send me a new charger. But if art was my primary profession, I'd have lost so many hours of work time already just trying to get this thing to work right. It took many hours to fix the pressure sensitivity and it seems that other artists have had the same issue for a really long time and haven't had any wayt of fixing it. And the charger issue will cost me days of time until they send me a new one. It'll take a day or two for them to even read my complaint and I don't know how long it'll take for them to decide to ship me a new one or how long that'll take. This is ridiculous. If I were making a living from art, I'd have lost weeks of work time if this were my only drawing device. The main reason I gave this thing poor review is b/c of what it's supposed to be and how much they charged for it. It's supposed to be a device for serious artists. It was designed for professionals. And they charged so much for it, as if it's a professional device. But a professional device wouldn't have these flaws at these price points. Other companies make much better devices. The problem is other companies who make much better tablets/laptops don't include a passive digitizer. That's why Wacom is getting away w/ these flaws and charging so much. Artists don't have much choice. Wacom knows this and is taking full advantage. They're shipping this device w/ the same issues as the last one. Even the chargers don't work. Sure, maybe I got unlucky with my charger, but they clearly had this problem in the past. They also had the pressure sensitivity problem in the past years as well. Ultimately, it gets a low review b/c it's too expensive. I don't just want to complain and have no suggestions. Just in case Wacom reads this, I have some thoughts: It would've been very simple to make a pro device like this nearly perfect. All you had to do was create a 2 in 1 laptop (much like the Sony flip). Put in a 15 inch screen like the Sony's and allow for the device to turn into a tablet. If you're greedy, you can have a removable keyboard and charge extra. The keyboard can have an extra battery to help w/ the atrocious battery life on the current model (4 hours for a 17 inch device w/ a 13 inch screen...). A laptop design would also solve the awful stand problem. And laptops have been made for many years. It's a proven design and ppl are used to it. Then w/ said design, you could either make the borders larger and add macro buttons or you can just do it the way smartphones do and just have small macro buttons on the side of the screen (Wacom would prob prefer doing it the first way as larger borders help w/ their issues around the edges of the digitizer, but then the laptop would be huge.) Then, instead of only adding the functionality of being a Cintiq (using the device w/ your PC like a giant trackpad w/ digitizer pen), you can add in the ability to use the device as a second monitor to the artists main computer. This would be relatively easy for Wacom as they've been making such devices for years now. Might be tricky designing the cables and inputs tho. This would be amazing as you could draw directly on the tablet with the power of a main PC. If Wacom's feeling generous, they can then add in a nice slot for the pen. Perhaps on the keyboard which they can sell different versions of to make more money: a basic cheap one, an expensive one w/ extra battery in it, and a pro one w/ extra battery and slot for pen. I'm no tech genius, but this seems to solve many problems of this tablet. They can't possibly mess up making a laptop, right? Ppl have been making laptops for so long... then again, they messed up making chargers and those have been around since forever. A friend told me to wait to see if Apple will announce an iPad pro w/ digitizer. Wacom better hope they don't, b/c that would be the end of this company. I don't think even their 27 inch tablet would help them stay afloat if Apple releases such a device. I don't really like Apple, but I would pick Apple over Wacom at this point. Wacom's using old tech b/c they don't have any real competition. They don't seem to realize that if a real tech giant like Apple wanted to, they could wipe Wacom off the tables of every artist. They should try harder just in case. UPDATE after "repairs": The charger stopped working and the pen doesn't work in Lightroom after a few minutes of usage. The pen loses sensitivity in Photoshop. After sending this back (fortunately, Wacom paid for shipping), it took weeks for it to finally get back to me. I read that Wacom would essentially reformat the device so I took time to remove my account information and anything else that had my personal info. But when it got back to me, the device came back exactly the same as when I sent it back. All they did was do something with the drivers and give me a new charger. This didn't need me to send this whole thing back to them and waste weeks of my time. They could've sent me a patch online and just mailed me a new charger. The one I had worked randomly, & when it worked, I could just keep it plugged in and not moving. They didn't bother reading everything I wrote to them and just asked me to send it back to them. To make matters worse, what they did to the drivers messed up some other things. Now it can't tell the diff between the pen and my hand. So when I use apps like OneNote, touching the screen activates the pen function. It's the same for every other program I use. It did fix the sensitivity loss problem (something I already fixed myself) and the pen doesn't freeze in lightroom anymore, but now I have to decide which is more important: pen use in lightroom, or the device recognizing my hand (something very useful to drawing naturally and quickly on this thing). I am now completely convinced that I will ditch Wacom as soon as something better comes along. I won't take off another star for this incompetence b/c they're still the only company who makes pro artist tablets, but their customer service confirms my original review. I have grown to hate this thing. I can't believe how horribly flawed it is for an expensive tablet designed for professional use. I'm begging for another company to give us artists the device we deserve. Updated: This thing is now essentially useless. Now the wifi doesn't want to connect in areas that even my smartphone can. I'm switching my ranking from 2 stars to 1. I don't even use this thing anymore. All I see is a big waste of money. I actually hate this device. And guess what? The charger they "fixed"? It doesn't work again. Amazing.