Pencil + iPad Pro vs. Wacom Intuos Pro

[Atomic Walrus]

I can confirm beyond a shade of doubt that Pencil input is not up to the standard of accuracy of Wacom's Intuos Pro or Cintiq line--if you're accustomed to Wacom's standard, I highly recommend purchasing a Pencil from somewhere that has a generous return policy so you can see how it fits within your own workflow. I have a light touch and work heavily with thin, tapered lines and feathered strokes, and there's a real weak point there, which is only exacerbated by the lack of a cursor when hovering. Notes does the best job of "faking" stroke accuracy, but it's not viable for finished work, of course.

I will agree that it is worlds better than any Bluetooth stylus on non-Pro iPad models, and for people who favor different styles of mark making, it may very well serve as a viable Wacom substitute! I wish it worked better for me because I hate Wacom the company with a passion

There's no question that Wacom's Intuos/Cintiq digitizers are still better right now, but I'm impressed with how close Apple's come on their first try. The Pencil clearly beats the two other mobile options (Wacom Penabled and N-trig), which is the real comparison for most people since the only portable Cintiq is the size and weight of a 15" MBP.

What I'm hoping is that the iPP (and SP) will force Wacom to be more competitive and release a good Cintiq Companion. One that could be at least marginally competitive as a Windows tablet, instead of a poor Windows tablet with a good digitizer.

Well the Apple Pencil certainly doesn't have the ridiculous input latency the Surface Pro 4 has. This - for me - looks unusable, but I recognize not everyone will have problems with it...

Go to 2:10 in this video. That is some CRAZY lag.

It's not fair to judge input lag unless you either have a hardware cursor (iPP does not) or are using the same brush engine. The problem is that you don't know how much lag is from the pen tech and how much is just that particular software brush.

SP4 really shouldn't have particularly bad lag considering that it's known to be ~30ms faster than the Wacom Penabled tech in the SP2 (Anandtech SP3 review). iPP may be faster, but only because of its predictive algorithm.

Latency crown goes to whoever's first to realize that vsync = lag. Even Windows has forced vsync at the desktop level (can't disable since Win 7). Triple buffer vsync can easily at 50ms just to avoid screen tearing.

 

[ara-mia]

There's no question that Wacom's Intuos/Cintiq digitizers are still better right now, but I'm impressed with how close Apple's come on their first try. The Pencil clearly beats the two other mobile options (Wacom Penabled and N-trig), which is the real comparison for most people since the only portable Cintiq is the size and weight of a 15" MBP.

What I'm hoping is that the iPP (and SP) will force Wacom to be more competitive and release a good Cintiq Companion. One that could be at least marginally competitive as a Windows tablet, instead of a poor Windows tablet with a good digitizer.

Agreed on all counts! I used the Cintiq Companion 2 as my main working machine prior to picking up the iPP and couldn't unload it quick enough--too heavy, huge, and unwieldy to be even remotely portable, with near-constant fan noise and extremely subpar Windows performance given its premium pricing. Wacom has gotten away with a lot solely by the strength of their patents for a long time. I'm hoping the success of competing products will start to shake things up a bit!

(It'll be even more interesting if Axiotron will ever manage to ship completed ModBook Pro X units from their long-delayed Kickstarter campaign! I'm not holding my breath on that one just yet. )

 

[Atomic Walrus]

(It'll be even more interesting if Axiotron will ever manage to ship completed ModBook Pro X units from their long-delayed Kickstarter campaign! I'm not holding my breath on that one just yet. )

Off topic, but do you know if they're using Intuos digitizers (like from a stripped Intuos unit) or Penabled digitizers (the kinds Wacom sell to 3rd parties that still have the wobble issue)?

 

[ara-mia]

Off topic, but do you know if they're using Intuos digitizers (like from a stripped Intuos unit) or Penabled digitizers (the kinds Wacom sell to 3rd parties that still have the wobble issue)?

They quote 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity and tilt/rotation support, so I assume they're using OEM Cintiq components or something to that effect. I think the older models did use Penabled digitizers, though.

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...-retina-quad-core-mac-os-x-tablet/description

 

[temna]

The thing is that the Pencil needs apps. So if you complain about the Pencil, try it in other apps. Different apps get different results from the Pencil, so as developers learn more about the Pencil, the better the apps will get. Simple logic.

 

[Dammit Cubs]

If it works as well as the SPen works on my Note 4 then I'll be going for a iPad Pro later this year or early next year

I think the pencil is better. I have used all....note taking on tablets and removing notebooks has been like a mission of mine for 4 years. ever since the retina original ipad.

 

[snugja]

I own a cintiq, intuos, surface pro 3, and iPad Pro and of all of these, sketching on the iPad pro is the most accurate and versatile sketching tool I have used. I doubt I'll be using my cintiq in the future for any of the type of sketching I do.

You can see my thoughts here - youtube.com/sketchadaydotcom or https://www.facebook.com/sketchaday/videos/vb.278330169551/10154398944854552/?type=2&theater

 

[Krevnik]

with a Cintiq, I can use a 100-pixel brush and easily flick a single stroke all the way from subpixels back up to max width and opacity. With Apple Pencil, it tracks your direction and pressure and will apply smoothing across the width of the stroke, which results in a more even-width line--desirable in certain applications, certainly, but not all.

So here's the thing, you are conflating hardware with what apps do with the input from it at this point. Apple actually doesn't offer any smoothing of the data. You want that? The app dev has to implement it (or not, in your case). The pressure range of the stroke is up to apps as well. Some of that may be related to the pressure range (I never got a chance to actually measure how many levels it likely has), but again, it's raw data the app has to interpret itself.

Apple in this case decided that its goal was to offer devs access to the input data. Drawing and interpretation is totally up to the developer, and not part of a pre-built API.

 

[ara-mia]

So here's the thing, you are conflating hardware with what apps do with the input from it at this point. Apple actually doesn't offer any smoothing of the data. You want that? The app dev has to implement it (or not, in your case). The pressure range of the stroke is up to apps as well. Some of that may be related to the pressure range (I never got a chance to actually measure how many levels it likely has), but again, it's raw data the app has to interpret itself.

Apple in this case decided that its goal was to offer devs access to the input data. Drawing and interpretation is totally up to the developer, and not part of a pre-built API.

You're absolutely right--my wording was incorrect, apologies! The point being that almost every app I've tried employs some type of stroke smoothing as part of their Pencil handling, and the ones that don't have other issues. Notably in the latter case, Astropad appears to be relatively faithful in how it parses inputs, but it displays weird "glitchy" strokes with certain types of mark-making, which may be why the other devs have favored stroke smoothing to counteract undesired effects. Or it may just be a coincidence!