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Review : Wacom Graphire 2 Tablet
Wacom Corporation is one of the few companies that makes Graphical digitizer tablets. Not only that but it's their only product. Most of the tablets out there are made by Wacom. Whether you are using a PC , Mac, Sun or Silicon Graphics , Wacom has a solution.
Tablets have been around for a long time and are heavily used in image editing and design applications. It allows much more precise control over the drawing program than a simple mouse can do.
The graphire 2 comes as a USB device and can work in conjunction with both PC and MAC. Also supplied is a cordless scroll mouse that works as a replacement for the pen.
How a tablets works.
There are different principles on which tablets are based:
Switches : The oldest technology is based on a mechanical contact matrix. Positioning the pen and pushing would close one out of so many contacts. The drawback is that as precision needs to increase the amount of contacts needs to increase , running the cost of such a tablet sky-high. And this had it's limits because of contact size.
Capacitance or Resistance : Other designs were based on the change of an electrical property of the sensor element. Pushing the stick somewhere would influence the electrical parameter the tablet was sensing.
The tablets using the above mentioned principles had no electronics in the pen. Adding functionality like buttons required a cable attached to the stick. And there was no way of detecting the position of the pen unless you pressed it against the tablet.
Magnetodynamic : Here the tablet emits an electromagnetic field. a pickup coil senses this field and relays the information back to the tablet. These pickup units were called 'pucks' and often contained also multiple buttons to select functions. Here again a cable was needed attaching the Puck to the tablet for the feedback signal.
The 'echo' based principle : This is also based on an emitted electromagnetic field , but here the field itself is used to power the tablet. The field is scanning over the sensor area. Whenever the field passed underneath the tip of the pen it detects the presence of this pen . This small field is enough to power the pen. Buttons contained in the pen can activate electronics inside that transmits information back to the table by inserting the information ' piggyback' on the field emitted by the tablet. This is the most sophisticated and most precise technology. The Graphire and most of the other Wacom tablets fall in this category.
The Graphire 2
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