Wacom EMR vs. N-Trig vs. Wacom AES

Thanks for the link, Meso. Sorry, I totally missed out on your review there, Precurve. Great work on those tests!

Still, I would like Precurve's assessment on the relative performance to the T904 on fast circles, slow stroke jitter, initial activation force, and fast printing vectoring.

Aside from the edge accuracy, fine-displacement precision, and fast sweep latency tests (which Precurve already said the AES performs equal or better than UD), I can't think of many more ways to compare digitizer performance.

Is this truly a UD killer? (Possibly even a DTK killer with better drivers/side-buttons?)

 

Hey Marty, I've enjoyed doing the testing and sharing posts with fellow enthusiasts. I'll quickly shy away from describing anything as any kind of killer or the ultimate anything. Hyperbole in tech and particularly the tablet and stylus space is almost always more confusing than enlightening. These statements don't play well over the years and the internet never forgets. A lot has to do with personal preferences. So I am DEFINITELY not saying this will end our search for the ultimate stylus. I think we, at TPCR, are an insatiable lot and I'm sure there are those that will try the AES tech and find it lacking. I've been in the pro design business for years and have seen futile arguments about the supremacy of various brands of pencils or ball point pens. The multivariate experience of digitizer tech on tablets in applications is more complicated.

I'm having a great experience with the Encore and it continues to exceed my well managed expectations.

Your side comment about FSCapture led me to download that because I have been trying out a number of screencast and capture programs lately. I really like it so far and I have a Vimeo file processing on an Excel precision test that I'll post here in an hour or so. I may try some other screencasts because I have done about all I can with words and still pictures on these reviews.

 

A quick unedited Screencast inside of Excel while manipulating the row and column dividers with ease using Trupen on Encore 8". I'm not positive that this is what the other n-trig video was critiquing but it was a good excuse to download @Marty 's suggestion for FSCapture and try that to make a screen capture. Keep in mind that the diagonal on the video is just 8" to match the screen experience. If this plays OK then I can try some other demos in the coming days.

 

Impressive, haven't tried it on my 10 inch but since resolution is the same and screen larger it shouldn't be a problem.

 

Glad to be of help. I went through about 4-5 screen capture programs over 10 years, before settling on FSCapture. (Additional plus, it's portable too! )

If you click the dotted rectangle button, it will do the magnifier assisted screen capture. Perhaps you could do a short video of trying to precisely capture a 1px boundary box? That to me is the ultimate precision test.

Also, what's your verdict regarding: fast circles, slow stroke jitter, initial activation force, and fast printing vectoring compared to the T904?

 

OK. I'll look at these. I have some deadlines this week so this is an ideal time for me to be messing around while my creative brain apparently works on something important and needs me to keep my analytic mind busy on something else

I assume by print vectoring you mean hand writing? What program? Is OneNote a good model? I find that the different programs manage stroke smoothing very differently.

BTW: I may move these tests over to the other discussion since this won't really be about nTrig and most of my reviews are in the other thread. I'll notify you.

I can't believe I've never run across FSCapture. I'm geeking out about it. These kinds of tips make it totally worthwhile hanging out here. In the last 2 weeks I've been evaluating a ton of these apps. Open Broadcaster does a nice job at full screen video capture and seems to be resource efficient but I love having a still screen capture and video tool all in one. Camtasia is too fussy.

 

I have devices of the three pen techs too.

Wacom EMR - Surface Pro, Vivotab, Vivotab Note
Wacom AES - Encore WT8
N-trig - Vaio DUO 13, SP3

The Wacom AES is very good (fast cursor tracking and better pressure sensitivity like the EMR pen, and much lower parallax errors than EMR pen), but N-trig is still better on the edges than on the two Encore 8 units that I have had. When drawing straight lines at the edges using the AES pen, the lines will become wavy (see attached screenshot). The SP3 N-trig pen, however, will draw a straight line as it is. There is also a YouTube video demonstrating the edge inaccuracy issue on the Encore. It's unknown how long the AES pen can last (on one AAAA battery). It would be impressive if it lasts as long as the N-trig pen (~1 year).

So far it seems to indicate that the AES pen won't last long on battery. First, Toshiba suggests to keep the pen cap on when not using the pen, which means the pen has battery drain when idle. Second, the AES pen will automatically turn off after long time no use (perhaps for power saving). In this case (long time no use), the AES pen won't activate (as if no battery) until you actually lay the pen nib down on the screen. This means until the AES pen is re-activated you couldn't use it as a mouse pointer because there will be no cursor shown. This is similar to early Dell/Synaptics pen - you have to put the pen down on the screen before you can actually use it as a mouse pointer. I have to say using the pen cap and having to activate the pen every time is annoying. N-trig does not suffer such problem (power drain).

What really impresses me of the AES pen compared to SP3 N-trig pen is its faster cursor tracking and better pressure sensitivity. In reality, the lags in cursor tracking in N-trig pen is merely a distraction to me but fewer distractions is certainly not a bad thing. The N-trig certainly does not lack pressure sensitivity if your only use is note-taking, but the AES pen has a much better pressure curve so you can actually write down non-uniform thickness characters as in the real world while the N-trig always feels like writing characters with a single thickness. If Wacom continues improving the AES pen on the edges and power consumption (no verdict on power yet), I can see me using the AES tech to replace my current choice of N-trig tech.

Meso makes a good point that we do not want to carry three pens (EMR for phone, AES for small tablet like Encore, N-trig for SP3). But I don't think the three techs have that much advantage for one over another to justify buying three devices with three different pen techs. As far as MS can make a Surface phone, Surface Mini, and SP4 with N-trig, I am all set.

 

This is all sounding very positive for Wacom's new tech.

I was asked a bunch of posts ago how AES's short hover distance would affect my usage.

I ran some tests and found that, when my screen is in "draftingboard mode" I always have my hand touching the screen surface, and slide around like that with the pen tip within about 5-7 mm above the surface when using it to "hover". This suggests to me that AES would not present much trouble.

However, I sometimes use my TPC in laptop-mode, and I use the stylus instead of the trackpad. I've not measured my usage behavior there yet.

 

Ok, the TruPen's drawback of not having a silo was vividly driven home to me today. I have a small bag and on the outside it has three pen pockets, one of which I use for the TruPen. Well, today I decided to ride my bike and it seems the pen shook loose and asked out of the bag and the wicker basket on the front of my bike without me noticing. Guess I have to wait for Toshiba to release TruPen as an accessory.

 

OneNote is the standard test as most ppl will do their handwriting in that. But maybe also try printing Reader/Journal/Paint? Those programs have progressively less smoothing, so we can get an idea of how bad the vectoring gets during annotations. Sorry to make you do all these test lol! But I'm a 'completionist' at heart...

I totally understand your situation; you go through so many apps and it always seems one app might do one thing well, but lack some other key feature or have a overly bloated/cumbersome UI. It's those rare gems that provide all the functionality, with a clean UI and no resource bloat.

Wow you got everything—true tablet PC fan!

Would you say the tracking speed on hover is just as good as UD? How about the hover precision? If not, where would it fall in between UD and DuoSense2?

Great report on the edge accuracy of the 3 digitizer techs! But could you also compare: fast circles, straight line jitter, initial activation force, palm rejection reliability/hover distance, and vectoring on small, quickly-printed letters?

Sorry to ask so much of you guys, but I feel compelled to get more data points on this exciting new tech!