Wacom next generation active pen (gen 13) , 4096 level of pressure + tilt + universal and more

BTW, I still have no clue what the hell Apple Pencil uses the Bluetooth for. It certainly ain't for positional, pressure or tilt data. Anyone have a clue? Is it just for device ID? But others already does device ID through the projected touch panel anyways...

 

Wacom has been so damn myopic trying to protect their precious tiny professional tablet and pen display business, that they got blind-sided by many in the component business. 10 years ago, they had the component business sown up. If they kept improving the component tech, they would not be playing catch up in projected capacitive touch active pen tech.

I told many of my Wacom contacts that they are leaving the bulk of the money on the table by concentrating on niche professional market over all else.

Smart money says, leverage their only real advantages they have atm: best in class load cell pressure assembly, and the legacy software support for art apps.

If I were them, I would make my money selling premium pens for all the active pen projected capacitive tablets out there at 50% or better margin, not trying to milk same margins from few that are willing to buy Cintiqs for their profession. That pro market has been saturated for years, and only thing they can rely on is upselling their old customers. That's a tiny market compared to all those who would buy active pens for their general use tablets. Also, market of still perfectly functioning used Cintiqs are vain of their existence right now. $500 used 21UX is perfectly fine vs a new 22HD for $1800.

 

As far as I can tell, Bluetooth is just used for giving Battery Life Indication. When you swipe down from the top of the home screen, it gives you the current battery life of both the iPad and the Pencil, and when it reaches 5% battery life, there's a notification pop up.

 

Honestly they might have to cross that bridge soon. While I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoy using the Pencil.....it still can't replace my Cintiq, Companion 2, or even my Surface Pro 3 because the Pencil is limited by iOS.

Should Apple do the unthinkable......and extend the Pencil to OSX....by way of Touch based 2 in 1/Convertible Macbooks or Redesigned iMacs.....that would pretty much be game over for Wacom in the bulk/professional market. If I was a dedicated Machead, I would certainly opt for Pencil & Imac instead of Desktop/Cintiq combo.

Heck I wouldn't be surprised if the fear of Apple doing just that, might have had some sway in Wacom specing out these Gen13 Pens.

 

Man if this pen is backwards compatible its going to be epic! I have been lusting after the Ipad pro's pen but at the end of the day being a mobile OS killed it for me I need my Manga Studio...

 

I doubt Apple will give Pencil compatibility to any of the OSX devices, but what they will do for sure is give iPad Pros USB 3.1 connection for the next revisions. That will allow Astropad to connect the Macs to iPad Pros at native resolution of the iPads (@ minimum 30Hz) . That's something at least...

 

Definitely for the pressure data. It's way easier to send the pressure data through bluetooth than through the emitters. Wacom's EMR method of sending the pressure data through the emitters belongs to an age way before Bluetooth existed and it's actually far more complex. The entire EMR solution is far more complex than AES, but 20 years ago half of the technologies required for AES did not exist.

 

Are you sure that it's using BT for pressure data? I thought there was too much latency in BT for something so latency sensitive as pressure data. All the BT stylus I tried for iPads sucks on immediate feedback.

 

All the 3rd-party Bluetooth pens suck, period. Bluetooth devices vary widely in capabilities and I'd bet the 3rd-party pens use the cheapest chipset they can find. Bluetooth 4.2 specifies the latency as 6ms, which is perfectly adequate for 120Hz polling, and you can easily emulate 240Hz polling by sending twice the data with every packet, so if you draw something in 240th of a second, it will only appear after 120th of a second, but it will have twice the data, allowing the drawing to be smoother.

The alternative to sending data over Bluetooth is making the touch panel sensor process the data, which kind of defeats the purpose of a universal stylus - it would be asking every touch panel to be more like a Wacom EMR panel that does all sorts of clever tricks to deduce what the pen is doing.

As for why 3rd-party Bluetooth pens suck so much? Poor engineering and a focus on marketing would be my guess.

 

The first intuos creative stylus was great when it comes to pressure levels quality.
Sadly the 5mm rubber tip isn't really the best thing to use for drawing.