Finally…my first Digital Pen Tablet: Genius G-Pen 450

G Pen 450 with box

G Pen 450

Price: PhP 2,660
Store: Octagon in Megamall

I must admit it took a lot of courage and will power to finally make this purchase. Ask any graphic design or comic professional worth his salt and he’ll tell you outright that WACOM pen tablets leave all the other brands behind when it comes to precision, top-quality pen tablets.

So why go for Genius?

It’s the price. Period.

Sure I’d love a WACOM one of these days but the prohibitive price of their tablets (the cheapest WACOM is around 3x as much as this one) means cheapo me would have to tighten my belt and cut down on Twiggies and Selecta Moo chocolate drink which I cannot do without beating my chest and tearing up my hair. Besides, I’m not into professional designing anymore. Ever since I chose to carve a career in the call center industry, graphic design has taken a backseat. Nowadays, I just doodle stuff for my deviantart account.

So how does it fare? Don’t even ask. I had a virtual nightmare trying to install the driver for this tablet. I kept on getting a message that the driver for my device did not pass the Windows Logo Compatibility test. I tried to uninstall and reinstall the driver several times. I even tried it on safe mode to no avail. After about 3 hours of uninstalling/reinstalling/rebooting and looking for drivers all over the web, I gave up and went to bed at around 1 am this morning. Although the Pen Suite and Trial versions of Adobe CS3 and Corel Painter X were goodl, the Pen itself was just dead as a driftwood.

Before I went to bed I was already mapping out a plan to sell my barely-half-a-day-old tablet if i fail to get a working replacement. My sulit.com account came to mind and I slept with a smile.

When I woke up at around 7:30am, I tried to give it another try. I almost keeled over when I saw the LED on the pad was off and not blinking frantically like it did earlier. I got the pen, tapped the nib a couple of times and the tablet LED came to life. I launched Painter and lo and behold! Everything was working as it should. Still I did not believe everything’s gonna go well so I decided to unhook the G-pen’s USB plug and reconnect it after a few seconds. Still working. I can only hope it stays that way. Heheh

Since this is the first time I used a tablet for drawing, I can’t say for sure how the Gpen 450 measures up to the lofty standards set by WACOM. So far, I can say the pen writes and draws smoothly although there is a bit of a lag if your strokes are swift and tight. The pressure works well, however, and I can say I was very pleased with the way it responded. Also, Im not sure if it’s just my laptop’s hardware limitations but the brush mode on Painter always reverts to a crazy, scratchy stroke and I have to press ctrl+B /B everytime just to make it work like a watercolor or oil brush again.

Ah, the joys of painting with clean hands!