For the love of all that is holy does anyone here have a tablet laptop.
I've been asking advice on such a purchase on some tech forums then i thought "What the heck am I doing? The people over at AWN would have more experience and advice on this than any of these guys." Well i did run into two 3d animators on my other forum travels but i need more opinions if i can get them.
I called Gateway to ask some questions about there tablet laptop and it was like talking to a car salesman, no offense to any car salesmen here. They had no idea how to answer my questions and then the guy says "Well, What would it take to get you to buy one of these today." ECK!
Anyway, Does anyone have any good stories or horror stories about these products? Is it just like using a graphics tablet? Is it very accurate? Love it? Hate it?
I would try one out myself but i cant find a retailer that carries any.
Thanks in advance for your help everyone!
I have a Toshiba Tecra M4 with a 1.60GHz Pentium M and 1Gig of Ram. Like I said, I run Maya, Flash, Sketchbook, Illustrator and Premiere on it with no problems.
Aloha,
the Ape
...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."
I am looking at the Tecra M7. Does your Tecra M4 have a dedicated graphics card or does it have shared system ram for graphics? I'm trying to find a M7 with a dedicated nvidia quadro graphics card but i cant find one in the US. There seems to be plenty in UK but they are rather insane in price. I guess i'll be calling Toshiba today to see if there is anyway they can help me out.
Mine came with an nVidia GeForce Go 6600 TE with 128MB DDR SDRAM.
Aloha,
the Ape
...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."
I have a similar powerbook; 1.67Ghz G4/ 1Gig Ram with an ATI Radeon 9700 (128 MB) graphics card... The open GL gets alittle choppy with thousands of polys, but aside from that, no problems. as of yet, the only tablet delays i've had were at HUGE resolutions with brushes over 150px. It's really amazing what they can fit in a laptop!
Hi BluePencil and welcome to the AWN Forums.
I have a Toshiba Tecra tablet PC and I love it. I mostly sketch in Flash or Alias Sketchbook Pro with it, but it can handle more robust programs like Maya 8. My only problem with it is that I'm a heavy hotkey user so in tablet mode, I don't have access to the keyboard. So I have a small USB keyboard that I plug in, then I can sketch away and still use my hotkeys. We have the same set up for our storyboarder and some other pre-production people at the studio I work at.
There is a bit of a lag if you draw large and fast, and there is bit of an off-set between the stylus and the cursor, but it's pretty slight. It's still much better to see where you're sketching than using a wacom tablet and monitor set up.
Aloha,
the Ape
...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."
Thanks again for the feedback. I would be useing this for drawing mostly and all I've got from the cnet.com forum is things like: "Tablet pcs are worthless and are on there way out" and "Dont waste your money. Get a regular laptop and a wacom tablet to carry arounf with you" and "there only for a niche market" Well I AM the niche market. It's good to get another opinion from someone in the industry.
I've read up on all the tablets I can and come to the conclusion that all but the gateway use wacom. Gateway seems to use a company called Fine Point innovations www.finepointinnovations.com
It has added a driver for pressure sensitivity in photoshop and i read somewhere that it has pressure sensitivity for alias sketchbook. Has anyone had experience with this company? I wouldnt even be looking at the gateway if it wasnt for its price.
Animated Ape, if you dont mind me asking, what are the tech specs on your Toshiba Tecra.
Tablet PCs are a great tool. The specs seem a little low for the price but then you do get an LCD graphics tablet. They originally weren't geared toward the graphics market, rather lawyers and doctors who would make more use of the handwriting recognition software. So this is the niche market that was intended and it has seen success there.
I imagine that many of the folks who say these systems are on the way out would also wonder why they might need Photoshop since they probably just want to check email and IM. You know, give a jackhammer to someone who needs a chisel and they'll look at you funny.
I've got a second-hand HP Compaq TC1100. It's fantastic for sketching using Artrage2 and Sketchbook. It slows right down with other programs and I haven't tried animating with it yet, I'm hoping a RAM upgrade will help. You can see the results of my tablet sketches on my AWN sketch thread.
Visit my website:
Claire O'Brien.com