Wacom Bamboo: Mastering the art of the pen

Damian Koh | Oct 12, 2007

The headline's actually pretty misleading since it isn't as serious as it reads. On the contrary, it's a lot of fun especially if you're using a tablet for the first time. If you belong to the corded mice era, there'll be a fair amount of relearning as replacing that familiar rodent with a digital pen is a different ball game. One example is that while we usually scroll down Web pages by flicking the wheel downward, with a pen, we have to draw upward strokes.

Setting up the Bamboo Fun is a straightforward process. Pop the software CD into your PC/Mac, install the drivers, connect the tablet, and you're ready to go. The Bamboo Fun is available in two sizes: Small (210 x 194 x 11mm with an active area of 148 x 92mm) and medium (280 x 235 x 11mm with an active area of 217 x 135mm). If you're a stick in the mud, you'll be glad to know that Wacom ships the Bamboo Fun with a mouse in addition to the digital pen. But that defeats the whole point of getting a tablet and you might as well chuck the whole thing away, or give it to someone else.

Unlike the higher-end Intuos3 series, the Bamboo Fun is targeted at home users and amateur photographers. There are four programmable buttons on the tablet with a center, larger touch ring for zooming and scrolling purposes.

The digital pen works almost like the old school pencil and it doesn't use batteries. It is pressure-sensitive, so pressing harder while drawing on the tablet means you'll end up with a bolder stroke. The opposite end of the pen doubles as an eraser. If you remember, this pen is going to replace your mouse. In order to do that, it also has to come with the left/right buttons, which are one-third down the column of the pen where the thumb rests. We couldn't quite get used to these buttons and most of the time we ended up tapping the active area once to single click and twice to double click.

We had the smaller-sized unit for review, so that active area of 148 x 92mm represents the actual area of our LCD monitor. It takes a while to get up to speed with using the pen as a mouse. Instead of having to constantly come in contact with the active area, the tablet detects the pen when it's 5mm away, or less. Only when we need to select something such as clicking on an icon do we need to tap on the tablet. Like we said, the Bamboo Fun isn't meant for the serious graphics animator or professional digital imaging artists; there are higher-end tablets meant for that purpose. But for a relatively inexpensive price of S$189, we think the Bamboo Fun is actually a lot of fun. Though we aren't sure why it's even called Bamboo when it's not made from wood.

Filed under: PC & Peripherals
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