Need help finding the best 2 in 1 (or tablet) for Digital Painting and some 2D/3D Modeling and Animation

Immitem · March 1, 2021

Hello there!

At the moment my i5 Surface Pro 5 is on its last legs as it is having all sorts of hardware issues and so I have decided to upgrade and leave that awful N Trig screen digitizer technology behind but it has been far, far from simple.

For starters, most 2 in 1s (and tablets) use N Trig technology, which if you have ever tried to draw with one, you would know creates jagged artifacts. Secondly, the ones that seem to meet my Stylus needs are either under-powered, have build quality issues, or are expensive A.F. (looking at you Wacom) so I am genuinely overwhelmed and stumped and am hoping the community can dredge up something.

What I Need:

Windows

AES 2.0 or Wacom EMR for full pen tilt functionality and minimal jitter.

Quad Core

Around 1 TFLOP of integrated or dedicated graphics card performance

16GB of RAM buuuuuut I might suffer 8 if all the other specs are top-notch

Replaceable storage AND battery

What I am using it for:

Digital sketching and painting in Krita

Light to Moderate 3D modeling and 2D/3D hybrid animation in Blender

Sculpting in Zbrush

Mind you, I do not mind buying second hand as long as the item is not more than 2-3 years old and less than 2500 CAD before taxes.

Thanks!

P.S. A couple of devices that I keep coming back to are the Spectre x360 14 as a fully kitted out, used one, can sometimes be found for about 1500 CAD on Ebay and meets all of my hardware needs but it still uses that abysmal N Trig, even worse than my 4 year old Surface Pro. And the Yoga c940 15 which can be found used for almost a thousand dollars more, but between the GTX 1650 Max Q and i9 processor, kicks ass however I keeps hearing numerous anecdotes over poor build quality resulting in premature failure of components. Also, despite supporting and coming with an AES 2.0 stylus it lacks tilt and most after-market pens I have heard have even worse jitter and the one pen I heard that is near perfect appears impossible to order in Canada from Lenovo (The Lenovo Pen Pro).