This drawing tablet bundle from Xencelabs is a great accessory for Photoshop users who want to fine tune their images and illustrations.
A drawing tablet makes software such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator much more productive and enjoyable. While it’s possible to use a mouse or a trackpad with Photoshop, if you want absolute accuracy and you spend a lot of time editing your images, a drawing tablet is an ideal accessory as it gives you a smooth working surface and the familiar feel of a pen to sketch, paint and retouch.
A good-quality drawing tablet provides enough working space to draw. It will also include programmable buttons set up as shortcuts for menu items that will speed up your workflow, making it easy to change brush sizes, switch tools or dial back opacity a breeze. Once you get used to using all the shortcuts and customize the tablet to your preferences, you can considerably speed up the entire editing process.
In the past, I’ve used Wacom drawing tablets. The brand has dominated the market for years, but now there’s a new kid on the block in the form of Xencelabs, a Canadian company that started in 2021. The company makes two sizes of drawing tablets and it also has a display tablet that combines a drawing function for those people who like to draw and edit directly on an image.
For this review, I tested the Xencelabs Medium Pen Tablet Bundle. This package comes with a 16:9 tablet and the QuickKeys remote control unit. The whole package feels beautifully made and meticulously designed. If I were Wacom, I’d check my laurels’ state because Xencelabs has gotten off to a great start. Incidentally, if you already own a Xencelabs Medium Pen Tablet, you can buy the QuickKeys remote unit separately and it’s well worth getting as it speeds up the workflow considerably.
Getting started with the Xencelabs Pen Tablet Medium Bundle is easy, but before you can use it, you need to install the Xencelabs software to get all the features from the system. The tablet is nice and slim but feels well-made for daily studio use. Two pens are provided with the kit, each with a different thickness to suit other sizes of hands. The oversized pen has three shortcut buttons, while the smaller one has only two.
In addition to the two pens, Xencelabs provides ten replacement pen nibs. Six of these nibs have a standard hardness, while the remaining four have a felt finish that’s more suited to coloring than drawing. There’s also a tool provided in the kit for swapping nibs and a wireless dongle for connecting the tablet and the QuickKeys remote.
The wireless dongle connects the tablet, remote and computer with as low a latency as possible.
