Tech journos suck at stylus impressions. Even after today's MS announcement, all the major press hands-ons just have the author scribbling randomly on the screen.
"OK, guess it works!" is about the extent of their commentary, it seems. Frustrating to say the least. I wanted to know if pen jitter has been resolved, is it that hard to plan a brief test of such a thing???
Tech journalists rarely know enough about what they're looking at to say anything meaningful, especially about something like a stylus. At best they'll write the name of their site in huge balloon letters, say "it seemed to work fine, but I don't know if I'd use it," and move on. I suppose if you were capable of being an engineer you probably wouldn't be a tech journalist in the first place.
The one thing I hear them parroting when talking about pen input is the number of pressure sensitivity levels. Not only is this one of the less important stats about a stylus (latency, accuracy, linearity, minimum activation pressure, these are all more important than pressure resolution), it's also marketing nonsense.
There's a reason this stat is always a power of 2: It doesn't refer to anything except the number of bits used to handle the pressure data. It tells you nothing about the precision of the sensor itself. Any sensor will have a min/max range and a "resolution," the minimum difference in force it can detect. The trick is that while a given sensor may only realistically have 300 levels of pressure sensitivity, you can use an 11 bit integer (0-2047) to represent it and say "our system supports up to 2048 levels of pressure." The PEN SENSOR may not, bit the "system" does. Wacom does it this way so I expect the rest of the industry to stick with it.
So my point is that you basically can't trust the tech sites to tell you anything meaningful about a pen digitizer. Have to wait for real artists to buy the thing and assess it. Even then it can be hard to pick out the signal from noise (guys I drew a stick figure it works great I don't know what you're complaining about).
It seems like there is quite a bit of input latency with the Pencil. Is it really that great to use this for professional drawings?
Lag is really hard to assess on these videos because there are 3 primary sources which you can't separate unless the device has an OS-level cursor visible (like most systems running Wacom hardware).
-Core tracking latency. Includes hardware communication latency, any interpolation done at the hardware/driver level before the input is handed off to software. We'll also put the system's overall input lag (display lag, etc.) in here because you can't change it with software.
-Software performance lag: Brush engines are heavier CPU hitters than you might believe, and in cases where the brush engine is bottlenecked by the CPU (generally single core) you'll experience extra lag.
-Software interpolation lag: Some brush engines are laggy by design (example: Artrage). They may need to buffer some number of input events in order to achieve a certain effect, like simulating materials.
So since all three of these potentially contribute to lag and the Pencil doesn't implement an OS-level cursor there's no way to tell what you're seeing. Is the Pencil laggy, or is the brush engine from the app not optimized well? Maybe only some brushes are laggy because they use more interpolation? Are other drawing apps more responsive? Impossible to know without actually testing it in more detail.