This is the brand new Apple Pencil Pro.
It gives artists pressure sensitivity, tilt, the brand new and magical barrel roll feature
alongside the squeeze and double tap functions.
At $130, plus the latest iPad with all its capabilities, it is an impressive piece of
kit. This Wacom Cintiq Pro doesn't have barrel roll, tilt requires meticulous configuration
in Photoshop and you can't take it anywhere either.
For all of this, you'll have to dole out $3,500 and yet all the professional artists
I've met use this for their work and not Apple, why?
To find out, I connected with professional artist Elizabeth Scott, whose credits include
background work on Rick and Morty. It was really cool, that was the second show I ever worked on and it's cool to work on
a show that has such a big name that so many people know. She too uses a Cintiq, the older HD22 model, for her professional background work.
But she also has a 6-gen iPad with a pencil too.
I'm not a huge tech person so I won't spend money on tech if I don't have to.
And I think that was, at the time and even now, like the cheapest version of the iPad
you can use with the Apple Pencil. So what do you mean by you're not much of a tech person?
I don't care to learn anything about tech, I don't need to know.
I guess like, so the 22 HD Cintiq that I used, that's what I learned to draw in school,
that's what I used at work. I'm worried that this is going to be a lot harder than I initially imagined, but considering
what's new on the Pencil Pro, I'm sure she's going to love it.
Are you ready to try these things out? Yeah. Okay, let's go.
I hope she's going to love it. Okay, so this is the new iPad Pro with the new Pencil Pro.
Want to give it a try? Sure. Okay.
The first thing I notice about it is I don't like how clicky the pen is on the screen.
I don't like the feeling of drawing on glass and I feel like my hand's kind of sticking
to it a little bit. Well, I might have a solution to give the iPad a fighting chance and that's this for
you to sponsor paper-like. So it means I have to put the screen protector on, which is a very daunting task.
So I'll go do this and you can try the Cintiq Pro.
All right, so I guess we should show her the best of what Wacom has to offer.
At $3,500, the 27-inch Cintiq Pro is the largest and best in their lineup.
As the top-end drawing tablet, it is the dream for all artists, available in three sizes
all with precise UHD resolution, 120 Hz refresh rate, and over 8,000 levels of pressure sensitivity
from the Pro Pen 3.
First thought is I like the way that this pen feels. The Cintiq pen that I'm used to is a little bit thicker.
I like that this is skinny. It just kind of feels like a regular pencil.
It's nice and light. Are you talking about the pen? Yeah.
It's actually really customizable. Oh, is it? Yeah.
Let me go get the things. Just like an Apple Pencil, the Wacom Pro Pen is customizable to your heart's content
with two grips, weights, extra buttons, and two different nibs.
So how did you customize the pen? So I added a weight to make it a little bit heavier on the bottom.
I also changed the tip to a felt tip because it feels a little bit nicer unless clicking
on the screen. And normally I have a grip on my pen, but I like how skinny and light it is without
it, so I left it off.
Oh my goodness.
This looks pretty good. So what are you drawing? I'm drawing a background.
I use Cintiqs to draw backgrounds for work.
So this is what I'm used to working with professionally. So what background are you drawing?
There's a lot going on in this. This is a little... It's a very informal space.
It's a little heritage house, I guess. Something I haven't drawn before.
It's not just the pen you can customize, too. The Cintiq Pro also has control buttons on either side of the screen and on the pen that
could be mapped to any keyboard shortcut you desire.
Oh, very cool.
I think my first impression is having the Express keys is really nice.
Personally, I use a lot of functions on the keyboard, so I don't know if I could go without
a keyboard. But on the pen, having an undo feature is very helpful, and I would use that all the
time. I will say that it does require a bit of time to get the feel for the buttons, and in my
experience, the ones in the back of the monitor do activate quite easily, too.
Okay, I'm noticing you're wearing this kind of fancy glove.
Yes. What is that? So this is a drawing glove.
You don't need it. I just find that when you're drawing for a long time and the screen gets warm, sometimes
your hand kind of sticks to the screen, and so it's easier to draw smoother lines.
One of the things you're paying for with the Cintiq Pro is the display's quality, and
so I got Labs to run some tests to see how close the display matches Wacken's claims.
Indeed, it covers the gamuts when in native mode, but strays from its claimed figures
due to some aggressive clamping when in the targeted color profile modes.
So what do you picture? This is a low angle, too. So what's going to happen in this scene that you created?
Well, I'm used to drawing at pretty much eye level, so sometimes it's nice to just
play around with angles, try something you wouldn't normally do, something like it's
a little more of a storytelling tool, like maybe this is from like a child's perspective
or a pet's perspective, just adds a little more to the narrative.
With the new Cintiq Pro, like how does it compare to the one you've been using?
It's bigger, and the screen is cleaner.
I don't notice a huge difference. The thing that stands out to me, actually, is I like the feel of the pen better.
I guess I do notice, you said there are more sensitivity levels.
I noticed that a little bit. If you didn't mention that to me, I probably wouldn't have noticed it.
As I've learned in the past, pressure sensitivity is very important for digital artists, and
the original pencil brought it together with automatic tilt sensitivity, too, which Elizabeth
doesn't use in her work, it seems.
With an Apple Pencil, and actually even with the third-party cheap ones, you can have a
tool where when you go straight on it looks like that, and when you go on an edge, it
looks like that. That's really nice. It is.
But there's not a thing on here. No, not that I know of.
So then how do you adjust tilt? Like you have to do it manually, or do you care?
Sometimes if I'm doing shading or something, I'll use a different brush or I'll lower the opacity.
Pressure sensitivity is what I use most of the time.
Huh. So like all professional artists just don't care about tilt?
Maybe some do. I don't really use it for the work that I do.
And none of your colleagues have been like, what? You don't have tilt on? No, I haven't been bullied for it.
The Wacom does support tilt, but it requires setting your brushes up manually in the respective
settings to get it to work, which as we've learned is something Elizabeth definitely
won't do. But what about the other magical features added to the Pencil Pro?
So you use Photoshop professionally on the PC, but you told me that you also use Procrate
on the iPad exclusively, and that is where the magic of the new Pencil Pro will rise
to the top. So they've added two significant new features.
One is squeeze, which you can set to open up a quick menu, and the other is barrel roll.
And there's a sensor that senses the rotate of the pencil and then can apply that to certain
brushes in Procrate. Okay, I'll be interested to see how that is, because if it works smoothly, that'll be really
helpful. So, just squeeze.
Oh, interesting. This could be really handy. I'm going to try just drawing something like that, and then, oh, it flips the whole canvas.
Okay, I'm used to being able to flip the drawing.
It's cool that it flips the entire canvas. Well, I don't know, fiddle around.
See how the barrel works?
That's really nice. I would, man, I would use that all the time.
I'm kind of surprised that that's not a basic feature in this antique, for example, because
I feel like everyone would use that all the time. Well, they told me it was, and no one used it.
Oh. So, and then they discontinued the pen that supported it.
It was really good. I was really impressed by it. When you told me that was a feature, I was kind of like, that sounds too good to be true.
I'll believe it when I see it, because I personally like brushes that are long and skinny, and
so every time you have to rotate when you want to do a new stroke, you have to right-click,
rotate the brush. There are occasions where it's like a little bit jittery, I feel like, but I would use that
all the time. Why? Because, well, being able to see where your brush is going to be and what angle it's at
is fantastic, because without that, sometimes you put a stroke down, and it's not exactly
the way you want it, so you have to undo it. So being able to see in advance where the brush is going to be is awesome.
Okay. So why don't we open up the iPad version of Photoshop and have you finish your drawing
on here? The lowest price of entry for someone looking to get an Apple Pencil Pro is actually $730,
because you'll need to buy an M2 iPad Air to go with it. Mercifully, Apple now offers a 13-inch version for only $200 more, instead of forcing you
to go with a large Pro like the one we're using here.
This one costs $1,300. So I'm not as familiar with the iPad version of Photoshop, so it's taken me a second to
get acquainted with it. That's understandable. Uh, okay.
One thing that I noticed right away for what I do professionally is I use the transform
tool a lot. There's a few different versions of the transform tool, and immediately I think that would be
kind of difficult to do on here. Apple says the iPad is a computer, but as I've complained about it in the past, apps are
just different on it. And for an established professional like Elizabeth, any limitations to how the software operates
is a non-starter. Oh man. I don't know what any of these are.
So this, so you don't like this? No.
Immediately. Uh, it would take some time to get used to. The iPad supports sidecar, so you literally can plug your iPad into your Mac and it becomes
another screen. Oh, okay. Yeah, now I'm at home.
I like this better. This is actually, this is actually pretty nice.
I wasn't sure because the screen is smaller than the Cintiq, but this is pretty good.
The icons are a bit smaller, but like not enough that it bothers me.
And it doesn't feel like it's like low-res or anything like that.
I mean, you do kind of get like a weird little blob at the beginning sometimes.
Is that a deal-breaker? Yeah, I think it would get really annoying after a while.
I'm going to try it with smoothing and see how much of a difference that makes.
Yeah, it still does it. But to me, it's kind of annoying, so it's not the screen protector.
I think it's maybe just some sort of pencil connection thing.
This is so close. The seamless way the iPad works as a drawing tablet with a Mac is surprising and impressive,
but there are just a few niggles that make it less than perfect.
But Wacom has another portable alternative option for artists.
It's called the Movinck and it's a super-thin 13-inch OLED monitor with all the same capability
as the Cintiq. Thank you. This is the same pen, just is not quite as customizable.
They don't have the weights. They just have a couple extra nibs in the back, but it's exactly the same pen that you were
using before. Let's see if it does the same glitch that we were having an issue with on the pressure
sensor. Okay, same brush. I'm going to turn off the smoothing.
No, that feels really nice actually.
So this actually was now working better than the iPad and pencil through Sidecar.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's not that glitch, which is really nice.
And also just in general, it feels a lot smoother. It's not as jittery as the Apple Pencil.
So there's a bit of a compromise with the pencil. It's like usable, but...
I also like the feel of this pencil better and I found myself a couple times accidentally
like squeezing the Apple Pencil so the menu would pop up, which I don't know.
I guess you could get used to, but just as someone who's not used to them, I really like
the feel of this. This testing of this little screen showed that it can display a lot of colors, just
not as accurately as either the Cintiq Pro or of course the OLED iPad Pro.
Likely because of a gamma tracking issue they noticed on all of the tests.
The Cintiq is the industry standard. So I would say, I would say go with the Cintiq.
I really liked the model we used today, but I think the Movenk is probably next under
that for me. And then I'd probably put the iPad at the bottom.
If you're thinking of working professionally, but again, I really like the iPad for Procreate.
I just like them for different things. For personal work, the iPad's really portable.
I like how simple the interface is with Procreate, but if you're just going to be sitting at
a desk, which a lot of people in the industry are, then it's nice to have like a big tablet
that you can draw on. The big advantage with this Cintiq is it's so big.
That's what I like about it. I don't know. You just want a big iPad.
Yeah, I guess I do. Like a 20-inch iPad. Yeah, that'd be perfect.
What features from the iPad would you want on the Cintiq? Brow roll and hover.
I'm going to go home and be thinking about how much I like it.
Next time I draw on my iPad, I'm going to be like, it's not the same.
All right. Well, it looks like despite their vast differences, Elizabeth is going to go out there and get
an iPad and Apple Pencil Pro. I cannot stress enough how much I won't spend money on tech if I don't have to.
So I think that is something I will look forward to buying when my iPad dies, but it's not
enough for me to switch right now while my iPad still works.
Oh, wow. I love what she did with the place.
Though, I haven't felt this short since I was a boy.
Anyway, thanks Elizabeth for drawing this Mac Address.
I'm curious in the comments of you artists, whom of you use a Wacom Cintiq and an iPad
or both? And if you want to watch another video we've done, you can check out the one with Audrey
where we compared an Apple Pencil to some cheaper alternatives.