Brightness

Overview

Drawing tablets that have an embedded display panel and those display panels have maximum typical brightness. You have been exposed to many display panels in televisions in phones and watches. Here I'd like to set your expectations about what you're going to experience in terms of brightness for drawing tablets.

Measurement

Brightness is measured in cd/m2 (Candela per square meter) but that is hard to type so man people use the equivalent unit of nit.

Lighting conditions

The environment you are using the tablet in greatly affects the brightness you need. Below is my take on what you need under different conditions

Environment	Notes
indoors + dark	Low amounts of ambient light. Light conditions are not changing. 200 to 250 nits is enough
indoors + bright	Lots of ambient light. Maybe be to bright indoor lights. Maybe due to windows. If window, then brightness may change dramatically because of cloud cover. 250 to 350 nits is enough
outdoors + under shade	Overall bright environment with lots of ambient light. No direct sunlight hitting your tablet. >=500 nits is needed
outdoors + no shade	Very bright. Sunlight hitting your tablet. >= 1000 nits is needed

What you can expect from drawing tablets

Overall, display panels for drawing tablets fall in the range of 200 to 400 nits.

• Many are within the range 220 to 250 nits.

• Only a few are >= 300 nits.

Distribution of brightness values

Here is the distribution of brightness values for pen displays released on 2020 or later.

Brightness	Count
400	2
350	1
330	1
320	1
300	2
275	1
250	9
220	16
210	1
200	3

Top 10 brightest pen displays

Includes only those pen displays that have been released since 2020

Pen Display	Brightness
WACOM Cintiq Pro 17 (DTH-172)	400
WACOM Cintiq Pro 27 (DTH-271)	400
WACOM Movink 13 (DTH-135)	350
XENCELABS Pen Display 24 (LPH2412U-A)	330
WACOM Wacom One 13 touch GEN2 (DTH-134)	320
WACOM Cintiq Pro 16 (2021) (DTH-167)	300
HUION Kamvas Pro 27 (GT-2701)	300
WACOM Wacom One 12 GEN2 (DTC-121)	275
XPPEN Artist 22 GEN2 (CD220F)	250
XPPEN Artist 24 FHD (CD240F)	250

Fan noise

A few tablets (only Wacom as far as I know) have fans. And these fans help to keep their brighter displays cool. The fan noise can be disturbing for some people. For others it doesn't matter.