Touch support
Last updated
Last updated
Whether touch support is available on a drawing tablet is first highly dependent on the kind of tablet.
Pen tablets (screenless) - only Wacom into us pro tablets support touch
Pen displays - Wacom has supported touch for many years now. Mostly in its Cinitq Pro series. Huion and XP-pen have a few models that support touch.
How well touch works also depends strongly on the device - and the operating system being used.
Here is list all the tablets I know of that support touch:
Pen tablets - The closest approximation we have to compare touch support on a pen tablet 2 is a laptop touchpad. In my experience using a touch supporting pen tablet doesn't match the experience you get with a laptop touchpad. Overall I find the experience less smooth and more jerky. And I find it difficult to click.
Pen displays - my experience here is that touch support works much better perhaps because you are touching what you see. However this is strongly dependent on the operating system that you use. I've been very satisfied with pen displays that support touch on windows 11.
Again it seems that most people disable the touch support on pen tablets and pen displays.
However I do turn it on more often with the pen display than a pen tablet - but I only do this when I'm not really using the pen display as a drawing tablet but rather as a touch sensitive monitor, because sometimes it is just so useful to be able to close a window or click a button with my hand rather than picking up the pen.
Microsoft has been deeply integrating touch into its Windows operating system starting with the release of the first surface device in 2012. And Microsoft has been continually improving how the operating system works with touch ever since.
For this reason using a pen display that supports touch with a Microsoft device we'll give you an experience that seems just like a Microsoft Surface device. Every gesture you were used to in Microsoft surface will work exactly the same in a touch supporting pen display attached to a Microsoft Windows device.
For Mac OS many of you will have used an iPad and so your expectations will be driven by how well touched support works with an Apple iPad.
However macOS does not have touch support built in unlike iPad OS. So gestures that you're used to on an iPad simply don't work on Mac OS even if you have a touch supporting pen display attached.
So you should keep this in mind because you may be disappointed if you get a pen display with touch support and expect a smooth seamless experience just like you had with an iPad.
Devices like an Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy tab S have excellent touch support. Their operating systems have deeply integrated touch and because they were designed as touch-based devices in the 1st place all applications on these devices natively support touch and usually very well.
These devices are typically better at palm rejection then a typical pen display or pen tablet.
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
Pen tablets - My experience with palm rejection on pen tablets has been poor. Because I placed the pen tablet between me and the keyboard. My wrists and forearms tend to rest on the tablet. If touch is enabled even though I'm only touching with my wrists and forearms that is enough to trigger the tablet.
Pen displays - Palm rejection is decent with the pen display. I think for me part of the reason is I don't rest my arms on the pen display as often which might confuse the touch system. But it is not as good that's what you would see with an Apple iPad.
Drawing gloves to help with palm rejection.
The very first thing I do with my tablets that support touch is disable the touch feature.
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.
Likewise, I have heard that touch support improved with the Wacom Intuos Pro PTH-x60 over the older Wacom Intuos Pro PTH-x51 series.
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 be better than others. More here: .
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