XP-Pen Artist15.6 IPS Drawing Monitor Pen Display Graphic Tablet Digital Monitor with Battery-Free Passive Stylus and 8192 Levels Pressure

didn't expect it to be sooo lengthy with glove included ❤️ this is my Christmas gift to my youngest brother. hope he likes it 😍🎄🎁

I've recently bought the XP-PEN Artist 15.6 at its full price as part of a graphics design University project. Having had the Wacom Bamboo tablet for quite some time, I thought it was time to take a step up to a full-featured graphics tablet. After seeing the price of the Wacom graphics tablet range, I was certain I was going to have to find an alternative. After weeks of consideration and research, I can say with certainty that the Artist 15.6 is a fantastic alternative to Wacom tablets. Below are some pro's and cons for the tablet:PROS• Thin at ≈12mm but very strong - great portability, I often take the graphics tablet to and from various locations, but you'll need a big case!• Easy to set up and use - powered through USB so doesn't require a wall connection (at least not when using my Macbook Pro with it)• Great pen pressure (8192 levels!) - my graphics look really slick and even better than my usual handwriting on pen and paper.• Comes with some nice ancillary attachments - well made anti-fouling glove and solid pen holder with extra nibs (although I don't think I'll ever get through all of them!)• Great & bright looking screen - the IPS display was clearly a good choice to implement in the Artist 15.6 - it looks as good as my Macbook Pro retina display so there's no problems between switching looking at both of the screens after a few hours of use.• Passive pen! Doesn't require batteries so no headaches having to remember to keep the pen charged, I just chuck it in with my tablet in the bag after use and away I go.• 6 adjustable buttons on the side - all customisable through the software available either on the CD given or the XP-Pen website, more buttons than I'm going to need for my work but a breath of fresh air coming from my Wacom Bamboo with only 2 buttons.• Super easy to set up the drivers and integration into my software packages (Fusion 360, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Autodesk Sketchbook)• Packaging was excellent - three layers of protection including the carry case, internal box and foam packaging - arrived in perfect condition.CONS• No included stand, but after having used it flat on the desk for a while it doesn't seem to be too much of a problem. I'll look at getting an articulating arm for this as would be more suitable for my workstation and keeping the tablet out of the way.• Pen doesn't feel as solid as some battery-powered alternatives but this a very small trade off considering the gain in functionality of not having to charge it!THE VERDICTAn absolutely fantastic Wacom alternative, especially if this is your first graphics tablet. Would strongly recommend to any one looking to buy a graphics tablet.

After having tried a similar product from a Chinese competitor, I was a bit weary of this new generation of Oriental display tablets. It left me feeling the technology hadn't been fully understood or evolved to take on the undisputed market leader (Wacom).When I stumbled across an incredibly good Black Friday offer from XP-pen (Japanese), I decided to throw the dice once more and ordered the Artist 15.6.Things started going very well from that point on: it arrived a day early to start with. The packaging presented well and once un-boxed the tablet felt well designed, well made and well finished. Some reviewers thought it a bit plastic-y, I can't imagine why, unless expectations were set at the gold-inlaid brushed titanium level.Set-up and connecting was a doodle. Driver install ditto. I had a minor issue with the resolution, but thanks to great online support that was quickly resolved (it was a Windows setting, nothing to do with the product).I've used it for a few days now with Clip Studio Paint and Photoshop - no issues. Drawing is easy and natural, surface resistance is right for me and the tablet reacts well to pen pressure. The parallax (the apparent difference of the pointer position from the the tip of the pen due to the thickness of the glass) is well within tolerance for me - I got used to it in about half an hour. Oh, and it comes with a battery-free stylus. It could do with more function keys though - should have gotten the pro perhaps.Overall, great product, great price. Couldn't say whether this is a Wacom killer but it's certainly in the same ballpark.

Amazing tablet for anyone that takes drawing seriously, it's a big upgrade from those tablets where you don't draw directly on the screen such as Wacom Intuos, and very satisfying and addicting experience to draw on. Just in case it isn't clear, this product is basically a second monitor with a touch screen. It only takes the special pen as input instead of your fingers, so leaning with your hand on the screen for stability is perfectly fine.Because of the thickness of the glass of the screen, which creates a kind of parallax effect where you kind of draw 'above' the actual screen. This takes a bit of getting used to, but if you make sure you don't look at the screen from an angle, it's fine. Also another thing I noticed is that the cursor is not exactly where the pen touches the screen when you hold the pen at a different angle, which some drawing techniques require. However, since you can still see the cursor, it just takes a tiny bit of extra coordination and isn't a problem most of the time.The display looks great, it's the same size and resolution as a quality laptop screen. After some calibration, the colors still don't look exactly the same as my normal screen, but it's close enough for me to work. When you draw, there is a bit of lag where the brush stroke has to catch up with your pen, which I think even the Wacom Cintiq has. It shouldn't affect your drawing, you don't have to slow down your strokes.Overall advice: If you're only just getting into digital drawing, I suggest a cheaper drawing tablet without screen to start off with. It may feel less intuitive to learn the muscle memory, but with a basic drawing tablet you can already make professional quality work if you have the skill. The Pen Artist tablet is best for people who want to take digital drawing to the next level and have more comfort and better quality.

So the big question is - can XP-PEN shake the stranglehold Wacom have on the Graphics Tablet / Tablet screen market? The sheer astronomical price of the Cintiq series always put me off getting one but I've been a Wacom standard tablet user for many years (progressing through a tiny little doodle-pad sized one through to Bamboo then to Intuos Pro Medium).I measure any digital drawing device on whether it's as responsive as Wacom's stuff and seeing the great reviews of XP-PEN's Artist range and being impressed with the videos of how responsive it was, I thought I'd take the plunge - after all, this tablet screen is half the price of Wacom's nearest competitor (the Cintiq 13HD), is a larger screen but appears to offer the same functionality.First off, the kit arrived very quickly (ordered on the monday with standard delivery, here by the wednesday for a UK delivery - most impressive).Kit was packaged in an external box with minimum padding, but thankfully the XP Pen box has plenty of foam inside to ensure your device reaches you in decent condition (assuming of course that your courier doesn't use it as a football. ALWAYS always buy through 'fulfilled by Amazon' as you'll have a better chance of claiming back if your device is damaged in transit).Unboxing is fairly simple. The screen itself is actually quite large, was surprised by that at first after the Intuos Pro Medium, so you get a huge drawing area.I couldn't find anything in the accompanying manuals etc that showed a wiring diagram for the cables but have wired up Cintiqs before at work, so pretty much knew what was going where (just make sure the red USB goes into the power, HDMI goes into the back of your PC or Mac, other USB goes into your computer into a dedicated port and you'll be ready to go).The display was picked up instantly by my mac. I downloaded the latest driver from the XP-PEN site (you can install the CD version of course, but I always work straight from the latest drivers supplied by the manufacturer).I should've read the help guides more clearly at first. I couldn't get the tablet to behave how I wanted - but realised my old Wacom drivers were interfering with things, so make sure you properly remove all those - and of course unplug your Wacom if you have one on your present setup. Once drivers are removed and the XP-Pen drivers are reinstalled you'll see the proper panel where you can test pressure settings etc and (most importantly) quickly calibrate the tablet using a 5 point system to ensure the cursor is exactly where you want it. Some folk choose to have the pointer offset so they can see it while they draw but I preferred to have it right under the pen nib.I tested the device with a range of different software. First, Painter 2018 where a quick bit of pen tracking gave me exactly the results I was hoping and praying for. Nice quick responsive lines, pressure working fine. Did not test tilt but I don't tend to use it anyway. Painter was, by far, the easiest package to set up.Then Photoshop (CS6). I found that I really needed to tweak individual brush settings as they seemed to be switched off, and the standard brushes / pressure brushes never seemed to be quite 'dark' enough unless I pressed really hard (and when you've just spent a bunch of cash on a device, the last thing you want to do is damage it by being over-zealous). Once I'd tweaked opacity / flow / pressure settings, things got a lot better. Was just a bit odd to have to do that from the outset but bear this in mind if you're again coming from a Wacom setup where you tend to get fairly dark lines from the get-go (one annoyance with the device was that it didn't seem to make any difference what I did in the XP-Pen setup panel with regards to 'click light / heavy' slider, so that could've been better. In general the XP-Pen software does the bare minimum to allow you to test your pen's pressure is working, set up your hotkeys and calibrate, would really have loved more fine control over the darkness / opacity settings for pressure there too).Last software I tested was my go-to for digital art, Clip Studio. Now, Clip Studio has a VERY good pressure / brush tracking adjustment panel that 'automatically' sets Clip Studio up either with single or multiple strokes to change a graph to reflect your drawing style. Alas, I found that I had to manually tweak the curve here to again get a dark enough mark without pressing too hard. After a lot of tweaking, testing, re-tweaking I finally got things to where I wanted them.The biggest change for me was altering from looking at a monitor and not what my 'tablet hands' were doing (as with the Intuos) to treating the XP-Pen display like a proper sketch pad. Once I got my brain in the right place, it started to feel like this was going to become my new favourite gadget and I can do far more detailed digital work than I've ever been able to before. It is a bit like riding a bike though, at first I kept accidentally 'dabbing' the pen when initially starting a stroke (imagine drawing with a leaky Bic biro, that's what was happening for me) but once you realise your stroke will immediately happen, you start to adapt to that.Kit wise, the build quality of the screen is fantastic (and I was pleased to see that you only have one USB-C sized wire going into the screen itself from your computer, older Cinqtiqs have a mess of cables trailing out of the side of the thing and that can be really fiddly). The 'matt grainy' screen cuts down on glare but might annoy a few folk who want shiny clear screens (personally I'd have loved this a lot more if it had a tough gorilla-glass type screen but that would've added to the weight and the cost too, no doubt).Stylus does feel a little on the 'cheap' side compared to Wacom's, but of course you get what you pay for and at least it's battery / charge free just like a Wacom one. And the flip side of this is that you can get a pack of 50 stylus nibs for just over a tenner, compared to Wacom's extortionate prices for their "hairbrush bristles".The nib stand has extra nibs inside (I think there are ten of them) so you need to twist the base to undo it, and the nibs are stuck in little holders inside. The underside of the nib base allows you to 'hook' the nibs out of your stylus to change them over. Nice design that, Wacom didn't think of that!The kit comes with a palm-rejecting glove though I think this is more to prevent your sweaty mitts messing up your screen which isn't touch-sensitive anyway. If you're one of those lucky folk who doesn't get sweaty hands when drawing in the summer, more power to you. Kit also comes with a cleaning cloth, extended warranty and a (fairly unintuitive) manual but there's tons and tons more info on the XP-Pen website and they seem to offer excellent customer support.SO if you're in the same situation I was - wanting a Cintiq but not wanting to line Wacom's pockets with £650 of your hard earned cash for the bottom of the range model, this offers a really nice compromise. I've spent a chunk of time with it just getting used to the changes in working, and though I don't consider myself anything special art-wise, the price of this and the functionality definitely suit me far more than spending more money for a 'pro' solution.UPDATE:Thought I'd add some updates to this after a couple of weeks of heavy use1) BUY A SCREEN PROTECTOR FOR THIS! No kidding, and everyone else has pretty much said the same thing - the screen gets scratched very easily due to the anti-glare plastic used on it. With just a couple of weeks of use it's already pretty scratched up and that's with me using fairly minimal pressure settings (so soft presses / harder marks). I guess the stylus nibs are a lot harsher than they look. I purchased the BroTect Artist 15.6 screen protector from here and it's absolutely perfect, was very easy to fit, does NOT affect tablet sensitivity, is matte (very important for anti-glare) and (so far, fingers crossed) appears to be as scratch resistant as the manufacturers claim).2) BE PREPARED TO CALIBRATE A LOT! I seem to have to recalibrate every time I use the product since the last update. It seems to be annoyingly just out of kilter to the pen's pointer most of the time (annoyingly, behind the nib itself) but calibration does at least sort it out - just a shame the settings never seem to stay put3) THE NEW PRESSURE SETTINGS NEVER SEEM TO 'STICK'. Again I seem to have to adjust these with every use. I think Windows users get a slightly better panel and don't seem to have this issue, but again several mac users who've reviewed this will bear me out, you will need to adjust the tablet's settings quite a bit to get the results you want and to avoid 'blobbing' (ie a dark bead of a mark whenever you put stylus to screen in certain packages - most notably Clip Studio with any of the pens).I will still leave this at 4 stars, but very disappointed the screen scratched so quickly without any kind of misuse / abuse (though to be fair, I have no idea if you'd get this on more expensive screen tablets too)

Used this thing throughout college and more amazing in price and wonderfull to work with