From: nospam@uq.edu.au   
      
   > Even after some years of using one, I still find a tablet somewhat   
   > unnatural, since the line you're looking at on the screen is not where   
   > your   
   > hand is. Although it's a big improvement on a mouse it's still hard to   
   > coordinate your finger movements with the on screen image, with strokes   
   > not   
   > always going in quite the direction you intended. In anime they still draw   
   > cels by hand and then scan them in to be cleaned up, this is still the   
   > only   
   > way to do really good freehand drawings I think. One advantage of scanning   
   > your pencil sketches in is you can adjust scaling and perspective, like I   
   > realised I'd drawn someone's proportions wrong and was simply able to   
   > stretch parts of the figure until it was right. Doing the same thing on   
   > paper requires extensive redrawing.   
      
   Thanks for that, I am now checking into the interactive pen displays which   
   are basically the tablet on top of a LCD/TFT screen which would create the   
   most natural drawing conditions of looking at the same image your drawing   
   on. I think I will go into a Mac store which seem to go more into tablets as   
   there will be more chance of having some display models up to play with.   
      
      
   > The size of the tablet is probably not all that important, since I find I   
   > tend to zoom in on a particular part of the image to work on and only make   
   > fairly small hand movements most of the time. I'm using a tablet a bit   
   > bigger than A5 (9"x6"), but with hindsight an A6 one would have been   
   > adequate since the problem with freehand drawing mentioned above means I   
   > tend to be working more on details, and anyhow to get a big stroke you can   
   > just zoom out the image so that a small movement of the tablet gives a   
   > relatively big stroke on the drawing.   
      
   Again thanks, this is precisely the info I was after regarding size   
   differences. Good to know I don't have to stick to the large A4 ones.   
      
   > As to make, I doubt there's any benefit from paying for a big name like   
   > Wacom, I got a Calcomp that was half the price of Wacom at the time   
   > (though   
   > I don't think the brand exists any more). Just make sure they have 255   
   > levels of sensitivity and a fine enough spatial resolution to capture   
   > subtle movements with pixel-accuracy (mine is 1000dpi but that is surely   
   > overkill).   
      
   Wacom seem to be decent quality but of course you pay for it. The cheaper   
   versions are 512 pressure sensitive levels (2032 dpi res) and the more   
   expensives ones have 1024 levels (5081 dpi res) - Looks like the expsensive   
   ones may be overkill by a large degree.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)