Drawing Tablet Screen Comparison

[Johnson69]

Long time fan of LTT, only made an account now because I wanted to make this post.

Why are the displays on drawing tablets like Cintiqs or Huions bad, especially at their price points?

I'm a college student, and at school we had an assortment of Wacom Tablets. Among the Pen Tablets I've used are the Cintiq 21UX, Cintiq 16, and Wacom One. At home I use a Huion Kamvas GT-191 as my tablet and primary display for my PC, but have recently switched over to an iPad 7th Gen with Apple Pencil for drawing.

Something that really concerns me is that when I watch reviews on tablets that no one really talks about the screen for too long - because they sadly don't know the difference. Digital artists, at least the ones I've seen to post on YouTube know basically nothing about screens and can only give thumbs ups. 

In my short time having used the Wacom One at school before quarantine it was the single worst display I've ever drawn on. It could've been any number of things like the room I was in or a defect but to me the pixels just felt off... kinda grainy if my 5 month old memory is accurate. On my iPad I did have to adjust the colors because it was a little too warm but otherwise, it is the nicest, brightest, most vibrant and most contrast-y display I've ever drawn on. The best part is this only cost me about 400USD+ with the Pencil converted to my currency! And its even its own standalone "computer". 

Color is something I've been obsessing about ever since I saw Taran's videos on it on his personal channel a few months back. I want to hear a more knowledgeable person discuss the displays on these tablets, and show how they do in CalMAN or some other color calibration software. The most I could find was a comment in a 2 month old reddit thread where the commenter told OP that drawing tablets make terrible art monitors [link], and another thread where the comments were back and forth whether OP's MobileStudio Pro or iPhone was off [link].

It would be a dream if LTT or an enthusiast channel like HDTVtest to talk about them and compare them to monitors that cost half as much, but Linus and gang have never reviewed drawing tablets except for iPad Pros and Vincent only doesn't even do PC monitors afaik.

[Johnson69]

None of the displays i mentioned are OLED tho... not even iPad Pros are, and the rumor is them to become micro-LED rather than OLED.
 

Gamut aside (mind you my iPad is only sRGB), my main complaint is that drawing tablets aren't dissected as heavily as monitors are, in terms of in-depth display specs like peak brightness, black levels and delta e values, etc; and are virtually free from needing to take a color calibration test.

True enough you could just get a second monitor, but part of me feels that that's saying its okay for the display on your drawing tablet to be shit, even if you pay a lot of money for it. 

Especially as the tablet goes up in price, how does having a lackluster display justify the increase? If you spent 3.5k US on a Cintiq 32 you at least want it to have a screen fit for something that costs that much, right?

[Johnson69]

Quote

32 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

the last time LTT reviewed something closer to a cintiq would be the Surface Studio 2 (and admittedly there's a PC to speak of)

Ok fair i actually forgot this thing existed. It definitely is brighter than even a Cinitq Pro 32 and as a tablet is probably really good (not that I've tried it). As a tablet it probably is good but as a computer it suffers the same problem as iMacs in that you can't use it as a display for another computer when you feel the parts inside are just not cutting it anymore.

38 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

(unless apple stops being so platform antagonistic and open up their iPads to have an independent display mode)

About this, Duet Display exists, but I'm not a fan that Apple Pencil support needs to be a subscription on top of purchasing the program. There's also Sidecar which is a feature introduced into Mac OS Catalina's betas. It also seems to support the Pencil as well.

 

41 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

that's the thing, in studios and the design industry they'd need control over colours a lot, so there's always a reference monitor in front of them right now. if you want a tablet to have reference level image performance then it'll cost above said panels (just from adding more parts and qualifying RF for their passive pens again)

 

i guess wacom still perceive their cintiqs as business equipment, so i don't see them budging anytime soon (unless apple stops being so platform antagonistic and open up their iPads to have an independent display mode). i haven't seen the colours on the newer cintiqs yet, but my 13HD right now is on par with the Dell S2316H i'm maining right now, so i can't imagine the newer stuff be worse that this somehow

Sadly i can only wish i could had the money or space to fit a reference monitor.
Fair enough, though, a studio would and should have a separate monitor that is fine-tuned to show the image correctly, but like how gaming monitors are able to have both high refresh rates AND really good color/image performance, I wish we could also get at least more of the latter from drawing tablets.

46 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

EDIT: also considering that you mentioned that you're using school equipment, do they perchance have colour calibration hardware?

actually no, not even the school owns any as far as i know. I would definitely like to own one myself though

49 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

i can't speak for them, but reviewers need to figure out when is something "enough" enough when it comes to various aspects. even so, monitor gamut performance doesn't even take up more than 5 seconds on the recent display reviews with LTT, so that either says "it's not that important" or "the graph is all you need to trust" (unless it's spectacularly bad, which would be something even a person or a camera could pick up right away)

 

also there's the tablet part of the review. they all just work now. the apple pencil as it stands right now is on par in terms of accuracy, and under-average in terms of features (a battery you'd have to charge, no extra buttons for other pen modes) it's really up to apple and wacom to introduce something to add to the discussion

The only reason why I want an actual tech channel to review these products is because the basic summary for when art channels review screen tablets is: "Wow!", "It's amazing!", etc. I'm surprised they don't complain why the tablets require in some cases both a Type C port and HDMI port when you could just combine that and even power instead of needing 3 separate cables or a proprietary one. They're all basically the same thing, just different size, different price, and some may have more buttons than others.

1 hour ago, VegetableStu said:

Resolution, colour and contrast balance is massively improved from the previous 27QHD model. However. I still find my 5k iMac has the edge there - particularly in terms of colour range in the shadows - and as such I always check my work there before submitting to clients.

This is the main reason I'm complaining. Dark images on my Huion are crushed really hard and it makes it really hard for me to look at dark scenes in games, photoshop, etc. When my little brother got his 144hz gaming monitor for less than half what I paid for mine, I immediately noticed that it had better black levels than my tablet (probably a VA panel).

It kind of feels to me like the tablet market has gone stale. Wacom, feels like its stagnated, and in turn all of its copycats have as well. Off topic, but aside from the display, the article you linked also mentioned that the touch input on the Cintiq 24 was pretty crap too. Basically not a thing on iPads (though I do fat-finger the buttons in ProCreate) and Surface Studios are highly praised for theirs.

I guess its up to Apple and Microsoft to lead the way forward? Apple screens are really good, even if theyre not OLED and Microsoft was at least able to put a bright (and hopefully nice as they say in the review) screen on the Studio, despite its other problems.