Wacom Bamboo Ink 'Plus' Pen

Wacom Bamboo Ink 'Plus' Pen

Hi,

Wacom Bamboo Ink "Plus" Pen greatly improves the performance of Wacom Bamboo Ink Pen which was the previous work, and improved by the battery built-in method which can charge USB C instead of battery exchange method.

As before, the Wacom Bamboo Ink Plus Pen supports the Universal Pen Framework (UPF), which can be used with the Wacom AES device as well as the Microsoft Pen Protocol, MPP, etc. used in Surface Pro Series. It's a pen.

As soon as the news was announced, I bought it immediately and used it for about 2 weeks.

Today, I will show you how much better the Wacom Bamboo Ink Plus pen than before, and what are the drawbacks.

As a reminder, I would like to point out that, first of all, I do not want to recommend it at this point, so let me take a look at each step along with detailed experiments to see why I came to this.

1. Specification

Let's start with the specification of the Wacom Bamboo ink plus pen first.

As I mentioned earlier, this pen supports UPF which can be used both MPP and Wacom AES. In other words, it only means that the pen is theoretically usable on most modern Windows computers that support digitizer pens.

Of course, there is a list of compatible devices that are officially certified by Wacom, so if you are interested in purchasing this product, please check with the compatibility list before purchasing your computer. (List of compatible devices: https://wacom.com/en-us/comp)

The pen also features 4096 pressure and tilt, and Bluetooth connectivity.

The built-in battery can be charged via the USB C terminal. It takes 3 hours to fully charge the battery, and according to the official specification, it is possible to use about 20 hours with one charge.

And since I actually used it, the battery lasted a fairly long time, and I had to charge it once every three or four days. Of course, people may feel different because of different usage, but personally I felt that it was longer than I thought without any inconvenience.

For your reference, the first step in the Quick Start Guide was to make sure the stylus driver is the latest available. If you access the website address, you will see a message that the page can not be found.

1. Appearance

Let's take a look at the exterior.

The cross section of the pen has a triangular shape, and the surface material is made of a soft rubber coating. And because of this material and its balanced center of gravity, it does not slip out of your hand, and it feels great to hold it in your hand.

The button on the side of the main unit has two buttons up and down. When tested in Surface Pro 6, the buttons below work as erasers in most programs. If you touch the screen with the pen tip while pressing the button above, it will be recognized by right mouse click.

To switch between MPP mode and Wacom AES mode, press both buttons simultaneously for 2 seconds.

But this button was inconvenient for me personally. The button was so sensitive that the button was pushed too easily even if it only applied the force of holding the pen lightly.

In addition, because of the triangular cross-sectional shape, the button must touch either the thumb, index finger, or stop when you turn the pen in any direction. So if you do not accidentally press the button, you just have to hold the pen for a short time or catch it unnaturally.

When you connect your pen to your computer with Bluetooth, you can set the behavior when you press the top button, press twice, and hold down the button.

The product has a total of four nibs, the softest nib being the softest, but a bit harder than the nib on the surface pen.

1. Noise

As a first test, let's look at how much noise you get when writing a pen.

There is a limit to expressing the sound of a pen, so I put up a video link. You can see from 3 minutes 45 seconds from the image below. For your reference, try to guess the approximate size of the sound based on the click of the mouse you hear before the pen handwriting sound.

You will not notice much difference in the video, but if you look at the audio editing program, the sound of Bamboo Ink Plus is slightly thinner and higher. On the other hand, the surface pen is a little thicker and lower.

1. Diagonal

The following is a diagonal test.

With diagonal testing, you can see how much of the so-called jittering phenomenon appears when a line is twisted.

I experimented with cutting lines in the Windows default sketchpad.

In the image below, a black straight line is a case of drawing a diagonal line at a certain speed.

The black line is drawn slowly.

The blue line is the surface pen, and the red line is the bamboo ink, which is the previous work.

And I looked at the graph in the Drawboard PDF app to see how it works.

As you can see, the line is drawn to a noticeable extent, and please take into consideration that my hand is shaken to some extent.

1. Won

Here is the original test.

You can check the scan rate and the delay rate in the circle drawing test.

The lower the pen and computer performance, the lower the scan rate and the delay, the smaller the circle is drawn when you draw the circle faster.

And you can also check how much slope error you have in the circle test. The greater the tilt error, the greater the deviation of the drawn circle from the position of the protractor.

For testing purposes, I fixed the prototype firmly on the screen to prevent it from swinging.

After that, I looked at Bamboo ink plus pen, surface pen, and previous Bamboo ink pen slowly, and then superimposed on it, drawing a circle and seeing the difference.

As you can see, Bamboo Ink Plus Pen has at least the same scan rate, delay rate, and tilt error when compared to surface pen. You can also see how poorly the previous Bamboo ink pen was.

1. Grip phenomenon

This time, I will test the hook phenomenon.

Hangul is different from the alphabet, because the stroke is short, so the pen will stick on the screen and fall off. So, if the hook phenomenon is severe, the character stroke becomes dirty like a handwritten ink.

To see how much hooking is happening, I tried to skip the two ways in the Circle Note app.

As you can see in the image below, it is ok to skip over the screen quickly, but if you draw a line within a certain range, you can see that the hook phenomenon appears on almost every stroke.

But I felt strange when I was experimenting with the hook phenomenon.

It was okay to draw a stroke slowly, but the faster the stroke was, the more it seemed that the beginning of the stroke did not appear properly.

So, after setting the pen to be most sensitive, I took a slow stroking motion.

In the image below, the screen turns white instantly as the pen passes by. That's when the pen physically touches the screen. And you can see that the distance between the position where the screen turns white and the position where the line is actually drawn is considerably distant.

In other words, when the pen touches the screen, the line is not immediately drawn, but the line is drawn from behind.

Note that this interval is much shorter if you use the same experiment as a surface pen. In fact, there is almost no gap.

So what happens when such a severe hooking phenomenon and a phenomenon that can not express the front part in a fast stroke are combined?

So I wrote the letters as usual in one note.

This is when you write down with a surface pen first.

Now, if you write a letter with Bamboo ink plus pen here, you will not write the letters properly.

Before we show you how to write letters, I will explain how the letters will be written in order to help you understand first.

In the case of "ㅅ", the second stroke is drawn quickly, falling from the first stroke, and then the line is extended upward by the hooking phenomenon.

Because the vowel "a" does not properly represent the beginning of the stroke, the vertical stroke is shortened and the right stroke is separated from the vertical stroke, resulting in a hooking phenomenon to the lower left.

In the case of the support "ㄴ", it is written as if it pulls out the vowel "ㅡ" as if there is a hooking phenomenon only in the rear part without the front part.

So if you actually write letters, you'll see this.

Do these red letters look like "mountain"?

1. Outline error

Generally, AES-type digitizer pen does not show much margin error. But that does not mean there is not much.

To see how much the outline error is, I dragged a small straight line around the top, bottom, left, and right sides of the screen in the DrawBoard PDF app to draw several times.

I can see that it is painted accurately without any problems in all directions. At the bottom, however, there was a strong magnet for the typing cover, which tended to be slightly out of focus.