Buying "PRO" tablets

Overview

At any point in the market for drawing tablets you'll see tablets designated as “pro”. Often these are paired with non pro versions that are being sold at the same time.

You cannot rely on the Pro designation to mean anything significant.

You cannot rely on the Pro designation to mean “better”.

“Pro” has no standard meaning either across the different drawing tablet brands, or within the models within a drawing tablet brand.

If confronted with a choice between 2 tablets with the same name if one has pro in its name and one doesn't - then do not automatically assume that the pro version is better. Instead take a look at other aspects of the drawing tablets that you're considering.

Example: Huion Kamvas 13

Consider these two tablets from Huion:

• Huion Kanvas 13 GEN3 (GS1333)

• Huion Kamvas Pro 13 (GT-133)

I highly recommend between these two choices that you go with the Huion Kamvas 13 GEN33 and not the Kamvas 13 Pro version. This is because when you look deeply at the tablets you will discover that the Kamvas 13 GEN 3 is superior in some important ways.

Specifically, the Kamvas 13 GEN3 is a much more recent tablet and has a better screen and uses a much pen that has much better pressure handling.

Technology evolution over the years

One of the challenges in picking tablets is retail sites like Amazon list both tablets side by side but these tablets can be made in different years and as a result they belong to different generations of technology. For example over the years the pens have gotten better and so have the displays. So modern pen displays might work much better in some ways than pro tablets from a few years ago.

For example, laminated displays used to be something that only pro tablets had. And now we're starting to see that in non pro tablets.

In addition pen technology has evolved quite a bit for some tablets.

A great example is the Huion PW600L pen. This is a pen that rivals some of the professional pens from Wacom based on my testing. And that same testing reveals that these older pens aren't bad but really are not as good as the PW600L pen is at handling pressure.

Practical tips

• pay attention to when the tablet was released into the market

• pay attention to the included pen - some tablets released very recently might still be pens with older tech

• pay attention to the tablet's model number. Some tablets have very similar names but are veyr different. For example: Huion Kamvas 13 GEN3 (GS1333) vs Huion Kamvas 13 (GS1331).