Wacom UD EMR

Overview

Wacom pioneered the use of EMR technology in drawing tablets.Wacom sells Wacom-branded drawing tablets that use this technology. There is a special branded version of this technology (called Wacom UD EMR) that uses in a small number of its tablets and that Wacom licenses to other manufacturers.

Generations

Based on this reddit post (r\TabletPCReview - "Wacom UD EMR Stylus Compendium" 2024/06/17) there seem to be two "generations" of Wacom UD EMR

  • 1st Generation - aka "Penabled" or "TabletPC"

  • 2nd Generation - aka "Wacom feel", "Wacom feel IT" , "feel by Wacom" pen tech

Relevance to drawing tablets

For drawing tablets, it is the 2nd generation that is of primary interest. There is broad compatibility between tablets and pens that use this generation

Identifying a UD EMR 2nd gen pen or tablet

Ideally it would be easy to determine if a pen or tablet support UD EMR. Unfortunately ...

  • There is no comprehensive master list published by Wacom or other sources

  • The pens are not labelled with the tech

  • The tablets are not labelled with the tech

  • Marketing information often omits any mention of the tech used

So, identification of UD EMR 2nd gen pens has to done on a case-by-case basis.

UD EMR 2nd gen adoption

Pen & tablet compatibility for UD EMR 2nd gen

A device that supports a UD EMR pen, very often, will work with any UD EMR pen. However this is not a strict rule. Sometimes there are some exceptions.

Here are a partial list of compatibility cases

  • Samsung S pen can be used with Wacom One tablets and the Wacom Movink 13

  • Wacom CP-913 and CP-923 pens can be used with Samsung Galaxy Tab S series

But there are cases where incompatibilities do exist

  • Wacom CP-923 pen cannot be used with Wacom One 2019 tablet. I am not sure why this specific case does not work. I suspect it could be due to a deliberate forcing of incompatibility in the Wacom driver

Limitations of UD EMR

Pressure handling

Pens that use UD EMR seem deliberately limited in how well they handle pressure. They generally have higher initial activation force and lower maximum pressure. I believe that these limitations may be partially related to how the pens are manufactured but also I believe that some of the limitations are artificial and enforced by drivers. Overall the pressure handling of an UD EMR is never as good as what you will see in a Wacom professional pen. In fact it's almost always not as good as the pressure behavior you'd find in modern non Wacom EMR pens such as those from Huion and XP-Pen.

Buttons

UD EMR pens tend to have only one button or in some cases no buttons. The Wacom CP-923 pen has two buttons- which is rare. In my experience devices that assume you are using a UD EMR pen don't make use of a second button because they are only expecting a single button.

Resources

Wacom Feel branding examples

Wacom has a "Feel by Wacom" trademark as shown below

You can see this how it is used in these materials for an ASUS product.

Videos

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