Alternatives to Wacom, and general tablet discussion thread!

[MysteryMeat]

So, recently I've become totally fed up with Wacom and it's drivers, in relation to my intuos 4. While the hard product itself is great, the drivers are absolutely terrible as they currently are.
While they are working they operate fine: responsive, accurate, and good pressure sensitivity. However, they inevitably wind up crashing or just vanishing by day's end and getting them back up is an inconsistent and unfortunately regular necessity. Fixes range from soft-rebooting the driver to a full wipe and reinstallation, seemingly at random, and customer support is kind of useless since there's currently not a permanent fix to these problems and, given the history of this persistent issue, probably won't be. _{(I want to be wrong but it's been this long without a fix...)}
It's like having to pop your hood open and jiggle part of your engine back into place every time you want to use your car, but without the option of getting a mechanic to fix it.

It's frustrating, and despite the quality of the physical product I'm tired of having to deal with the incompetence of their programmers.

In short:
                 


So, I want to start a general discussion thread on tablets, specifically alternatives to Wacom that are comparable in quality or, at least, more reliable!

[Atnas]

I am sorry you anecdotally had problems with Wacom but any alternative will have even spottier stability across the board.

On the other hand, whatever is making those drivers not play nice with your computer could potentially not be a problem with wintab or any other tablet implementation, so I'd recommend a yiynova as I used one of those for a few years. It was just sitting in my closet for the past 3 years because I got a cintiq back then, but I just gave it to Kasumi when he visited a month or so ago. However it's the non "+" 19 inch model, don't get any unless they have a "+" or are very new variety. He also can't comment on it as I didn't have the pen to give him, he needs to buy one of those. Prism also has a yiynova, although it is not currently working, probably because his pen broke. But he seemed happy with it.

I can't speak for non tablet monitors as I haven't used those in 5 years, but I helped get Jun a Huion last year (I think that was the one). He'll have to speak to his experiences on that tablet, but he seemed to really enjoy it.

[MysteryMeat]

The problem seems likely to be on the driver end, since it's a notable problem across multiple people I've interacted with and people on unhelpful tech-support forums where I originally got both of the quick workaround methods that don't actually fix the problem.

I've tried some more obscure stuff today (deleting onedrive from my system since it evidently shares a specific sysfile with the driver or something) but I don't have the highest hopes for that solution.

[Achrileg]

I used a Trust Widescreen tablet for multiple years, then the pen died, and instead of repalacing it, I bought a new Huion tablet from ebay and it's serving me with no issues for 2 years. No driver issues or anything. I'm not currently using Windows10, so compatibility issues may arise with older tablets.

I'm not counting my first super small Genius tablet, which served me extremely well though.

I've never had a Wacom and see literally no reason to get one, besides support. I guess when it comes to support, it's hit or miss whether you will need it. Then again, it's almost cheaper to buy a Huion and then replace it when needed rather than buy an equivalent Wacom.

That being said, I've no experience with tablets /w screens.

[Kairos]

Personally, I don't use a tablet for pixel art at all  I find the mouse to be more precise and comfortable.

As for recommendations, I have heard many good things of Huion tablets and I am thinking about acquiring one soon. I use a Bamboo onetouch for misc digital art and it has never given me any problems so far (until I forgot about it in a closet for a long time and then mice chewed its wire).

[Ai]

Monoprice pen is a little bit flimsy, but otherwise nice, no complaint software-wise or price-wise ($80 AUD + $10 per spare pen). Much better feel/responsiveness than my previous Graphire3, overall more robust. Same chipset as the Huion tablets use, AFAIK, so should work similarly. The hardware doesn't do tilt, only pressure, in case that's an issue.

(I use Linux though, so YMMV -- Drivers tend to generally just work if they exist at all for a device. Just used the generic xf86-libinput driver, no fuss; When I had a Wacom, same deal but with the xf86-wacom driver.)

[absenter]

I was just in the middle of mentioning Monoprice, but Ai beat me to the punch. I've had mine for over 5 years and there have been no problems.

http://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=10594
http://frenden.com/post/31659364200/the-little-monoprice-graphics-tablet-that-could

[surt]

I've got both a Huion tablet and a Yiynova pen display (both UC-Logic digitizers) and found their out-of-the-box pressure response considerably nicer than the out-of-the-box pressure response of my various Wacom tablets. I've never been sufficiently bothered by it to do any serious calibration though, so fully calibrated performance I can't compare.

Still prefer my Wacom as it just works everywhere with no hassles.