Wacom AES caught up to Apple pencil? HP rechargeable pen supports 240 Hz report rate and tilt

Slow diagonal lines on Surface Pro 2017 with Bamboo Ink versus Surface pen [at 4m29s]:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACx7BXf8qJc&t=4m29s


I would guess that the Ink uses MPP 1.0 and the Surface pen uses MPP 1.51.
Wonder how the Dell Premium Active Pen performs.

 

The plot thickens! MPP 1.8 supports 266Hz polling.

 

Some confusion about what's MPP 1.51 and MPP 1.8. SP4 still had wobble... if that's MPP 1.51 that means the wobble-less devices are all MPP 1.8. I think the chart's wrong and SP4 is still MPP 1.0, and SP2017 is MPP 1.51, and it's forward-compatible with MPP 1.8/2.0.

 

It's the latest version of the Surface Pen: you can see it by the the larger rubbery nib.

 

266Hz. WHY? Stupid waste of battery I say. 133Hz is more than enough. Faster polling rate don't do anything to fix sh*t like fish hooks, which BTW if Surface Go has MPP 1.8 panel, I might end up cracking my skull by face palming so f'n hard...

240/266Hz. 4096 levels. All stupid dick measuring marketing oneupmanship that doesn't actually make for better pen experience. Old ass EMR devices with 133Hz and 256 levels still feel way better than any of this new crap if that tells you anything. So damn frustrating...

Also, MS should stop wasting energy with useless pen improvements and do practical stuff like letting Windows map custom pen barrel button functions and give the damn pen back the second barrel button. NO ONE WANTED AN ON/OFF ERASER ON THE BACK. At least the old pens lets you use eraser with pressure with the barrel button click with pen action.

 

Great image. You do have a way with words.

 

With super-capacitor pens charging in 15 seconds I think the days of interrupted work due to dead batteries are behind us.

Faster polling does help eliminate trails at ends of strokes, but a more sensitive tip mechanism helps more, which is why Wacom's 1-gram and 3-gram sensors do far better than Microsoft's 10-gram and 12-gram sensors.

Fast writers easily reach six curves per second. This gives about 22 points per curve at 133Hz. This is accurate enough but not excessive. If, like me, you don't like smoothing, 266Hz polling is useful for more accurate fast curves.

4000 levels across 100 grams, though, that's excessive. I doubt anyone can discern or use more than 256 levels across 100 grams.

If anything, MS has finally fixed the wobble issue that people have been banging on about for four years since SP3. They're definitely doing something right. Wacom and clueless reviewers are to blame for the pressure-level wars.

 

More like 3-400gr. With the pen sensitivity set to 6.
5-600+ to reach max pressure if you set it to 1.

 

If pen battery power is no more of an issue, I'd much rather they crank the power for the hover distance increase and hover latency reduction.

Fish hook ain't got to do with any of that IMO. It's mis-synchronization of pen pressure data communication with the digitizer board IMO. Synaptics 1.0 pens had severe problems with it and they fixed it with pen of same load sensor specs. They just did a better job synching up the digitizer and the pen's load sensor.

The fastest curve you can draw is tiny circles and I tell ya, to make 133Hz panel vector, I literally have to make my arm burn in pain lol.

Is Wobble issue referring to slow diagonal jittering? If they fixed that on all new Surfaces, kudos.

 

In that case then 500 levels of force might be merited (I suppose some people can manipulate a pen tip's force at 1 gram intervals) but 4000 is still overkill by an order of magnitude. Anybody who wants to test the sensitivity of their pen-manipulation can buy a 0.01-gram scale and try for themselves.

They did, and it only took them four years and three product iterations.

Please forgive my handwriting. This is a sample of Wacom AES 1.0 (133Hz) at a reasonably fast writing speed (four letters per second). Every single letter is vectored. You can't see it at 100% zoom, but it's there. Please note that the monkey tails are part of my handwriting and not a digitizer artifact. This is almost identical to my on-paper handwriting with the exception of the vectoring, of course. Doubling the polling rate would definitely improve the stroke reproduction accuracy.

I'm not saying 133Hz is bad. The fact that you have to zoom to see the vectoring means it's good. But it can be improved.