Touch support
Availability of touch support
Only a very small number of drawing tablets are touch sensitive.
Tablets that support touch
Here is list all the tablets I know of that support touch.
| Pen tablet | Pen display |
|---|---|
Wacom Intuos Pro Small (PTH-460) Wacom Intuos Pro Medium (PTH-660) Wacom Intuos Pro Large (PTH-860) Wacom Intuos Pro Small (PTH-451) Wacom Intuos Pro Medium (PTH-651) Wacom Intuos Pro Large (PTH-851) | Wacom Cintiq Pro 16 (DTK-167) Wacom Cintiq Pro 17 (DTH-172) Wacom Cintiq Pro 22 (DTH-227) Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 Touch (DTH2420) Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 (DTK-271) Wacom One 13 touch GEN2 (DTH-134) Wacom Movink 13 (DTH-135) XP-Pen Artist Pro 16TP (MD160U) Huion Kamvas Pro 19 (GT1902) Huion Kamvas Pro 27 (GT2701) |
Quality of touch support
In my opinion, no drawing tablet offers a great touch experience. Some are truly terrible. Even the ones with the best touch support are NOT comparable to a laptop trackpad or an iPad which are much better.
Operating system support
If you do have a tablet that supports touch, it will work MUCH better on Windows. Windows has had deep touch support for a very long time.
MacOS does not have as good support for touch.
Note that some tablets only have touch support on Windows but have no touch support on MacOS at all.
Compared to the iPad
Again, in neither case does touch come close to what you would experience with an iPad. One area where the iPad is clearly better is palm rejection.
Disabling touch support
All tablets that have touch allow a user to disable touch support
Some tablets have a physical switch to enable and disable touch.
Drivers also tend to allow you to disable touch
Drawing gloves to help with palm rejection.
Because a drawing tablet with touch may not reject the palm as well as an iPad, consider using a drawing glove. They can help substantially with palm rejection. I've noticed though that some gloves seem to bve better than others. More here: Drawing gloves.
My own use of touch
The very first thing I do with my tablets that support touch is disable the touch feature.
How often is touch used in drawing tablets
There will be outliers and of course I don't have anything but anecdotal data, but my sense of it is that most users of tablets disable the touch support.
Notes on Wacom Cintiq Pro models
The recent Cintiq Pro 16 and 27 models from Wacom introduced in 2021 , 2022, and 2023 have much better touch than older Wacom models, but it is not as good as what you would get from an iPad.
Resources
r/wacom - Touch or No Touch? 2021/12/10
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