Wacom Cintiq 12WX – LCD Tablet Sketchbook
This month, Wacom releases the Wacom Cintiq 12WX – a “sketchbook” version of the critically-acclaimed Cintiq drawing tablet. Cintiqs are tablets with built-in LCD screens so you can draw directly on the image. This new 12WX model is only 26cm x 16cm and a full 8 kilograms lighter than its big-sister, the 21UX. In short, the new Cintiq is a lot more portable.
The Cintiq 12WX is now available in North America. And for those of you in Europe, I notice it’s also available on the Amazon.co.uk site, but apparently won’t ship before Christmas. If there are any reader reviews, please post in the comments! And a note to Wacom: We’d be happy to test-drive these things for you whenever you like.
Here’s a YouTube demo for the little beauty, so you can see it in action:
Also of interest:
Wacom Cintiq 12″ Sketchbook Display at Amazon.com
Wacom Cintiq 21″ Big Display at Amazon.com
Turntablet: rotate your Cintiq
i cried a little…
Christmas (and wishful thinking) is just around the corner…
I got to get me one
What gets me is when it turns into a normal tablet when accessing a secondary display… genius.
Ok… we just had a Wacom sales rep come by our studio and demo the new Cintiq12WX so I wrote up a some thoughts on it …simply put, it’s amazing. All of us were drooling over it within seconds of seeing it. It’s about the size of a 9×12 wacom tablet in width and thickness and is extremely light and seemed to stay cool. The screen is bright and crisp. That said, the screen itself is a bit small, which is also part of it’s appeal in some ways. The rep had it running on a Mac with all of his fonts cranked down to like 6pt to make more real estate on the screen which was fine and readable. The side buttons are something I rarely use but will likey use now. The sliders are now pen stylus sensitive and can be tapped like a button to increase/decrease or scroll up/down or whatever buttons you want to program into them. Also you’ll notice the edges of the Cintiq are sloped downwards with the sliders on the outer edge to prevent accidental zooming/scrolling etc with your arms.
In size, it’s basically like working inside of a margined 8.5×11 surface. Some of the cool stuff about it is that it finally is practical to spin it around to draw tough angles thanks to its size and weight plus the little perfectly centered low profile nylon nub on the back that allow one to spin it on an axis. The stand on the back only has 2 positions standing or folded, but the standing position seemed fine if you need that. One could get a little creative and figure out how to angle it to diff positions if need be. The really cool thing is that it’s now practical to put the thing in your lap and work with it.
The ugly part of this is all the cabling. There’s a 4×4x1inch box that all your cables, including a monitor cable, have to be routed through. I guess there’s really no other solution to this unless they adopt the HDMI standard somewhere down the road. (not likely)
But the news that caught me by surprise was the price: According to tour rep here in the PNW, it’s going to be available mid December in the US for $995.00! We had all calculated $1700+ based on the Euro conversion rate but I guess they’re getting aggressive with it’s pricing in the US to get it out to as many students and professionals with portable studios as possible. I have a feeling you’re going to see a lot of these in cafe’s soon, I may be one of them:)
…ok after watching their little ad it looks like they’ll have multiple positions for the stand. We must have had an early version with only up or down position. Anyway I think you’re going to love it.
$995.00 US?!
# vincent giard says:
November 29th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
$995.00 US?!
That’s what the rep said…
The whole thing isn’t 26cm x 16cm, that’s just the size of the screen. Wacom’s site says the real dimensions are 405mm x 270mm and 17mm thick, or for US losers like myself, about 16″ x 10.6″ and two thirds of an inch thick.
That price is about what I thought it would be when I first saw this. A lot of things are more expensive in the UK so you can’t just estimate the US price by converting the price to dollars (which would come out to ~$1700). I mean, the regular Cintiq 21UX is selling for £2190 which is ~$4500, waaaay more than the $2500 it actually sells for here.
I estimated what it would cost by using percentages though. This new Cintiq 12WX is £830 which is about 38% of the cost of a Cintiq 21UX is ~£2200 in the UK. In the US, the Cintiq 21UX sells for $2500, but the price of the 12WX will still be about 38% of that which comes out to $950 — pretty close to the $995 that Rayl was quoted.
This is great news. I was just about to pull the trigger on the 21UX. I’ll be checking out Wacom’s site every day.
Can someone take pity on a noob and explain the differences/advantages of this device over a Tablet PC? Much appreciated.
Funny. They’re suggesting in their commercial that you can walk around with it like a tablet PC. But apparently you can’t….
There are rumours that Apple will build a tablet MAC next year. I will wait for that one.
It’s official. Saw a story on Macworld, Wacom has updated their site. 999 USD as reported.
Go look: http://www.wacom.com/cintiq/12WX.cfm
http://www.wacom.com/cintiq/12WX.cfm
it’s available now in the US for $999.00.
I was off by $5 bucks:)
jeroen, can you tell me where you heard about that tablet mac?
And does anyone have information on how much the 12WX will be in Euros?
I am purchasing one.
Done.
Actually….got a little too excited there…available in the US, but no shipping to Canada….So, now I have to figure out how to get one of these.
drooling… I know what to buy for xmas now :)
The Mac Tablet or iWhatever legend has been around for years… Although with the iPhone touch screen, it makes more sense now, I trust Wacom more for pro app technology geared towards drawing. So I’ll buy that one now, and I wouldn’t hold my breath for an Apple alternative just yet ;)