Genius MousePen 8 x 6-Inch Graphic Tablet for Home and Office by Genius
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Digital camera reviews of Genius MousePen 8 x 6-Inch Graphic Tablet for Home and Office
Digital camera Review: Cheap, flimsy, but might be okay for casual user.
Summary: 1 Stars
I'll be straight with you -- I've only used professional Wacom tablets. I'm spoiled. I'm an artist by trade, and found after upgrading my computer system that my 12 year old Wacom tablet had no driver support for Windows 7. Purchasing the Genius MousePen 8x6 tablet was an experiment to see if a cheaper make and model would suffice.
Pros:
The largest surface area for a graphics tablet for the money that I could find. Includes pen, mouse, and tablet. Does have pressure sensitivity, tracked accurately enough to do handwriting or casual drawing.
Cons:
You get what you pay for. It doesn't claim to be a professional tablet. It's described as a "home and office graphic tablet" because it's meant for the causal user. That said, after using Wacom Tablets for so many years, this tablet felt exceedingly cheap and flimsy to me. Software wasn't very good, and drivers seemed less bulletproof than I would expect.
Tablet:
This will sound like a stupid criticism if you aren't someone who spends a lot of hours using a tablet doing artwork -- but the tablet surface, touching the pen to it, felt scratchy, cheap, and distracting. If you're doing hours of work drawing and sketching on the computer, it's less than ideal. Again, for $40 bucks, maybe if I were a high school kid or casual digital painter, I could get used to it.
Pen:
The pen uses a AA battery. Pull it apart into two pieces, and the battery goes on this thin, flimsy strip of metal that touches each end. The construction looked like the inside of a $2 kid's flashlight. Wacom pens, by comparison, use no batteries, relying on magnetic induction or... unicorn spit, or some such thing -- I don't exactly know. I've just never heard of one breaking, ever.
A handy tip -- be very careful when installing the battery into the Genius pen, and align the two halves precisely. I didn't, and it got seriously jammed in the wrong position. I nearly broke the thing trying to pry it apart again. And never, EVER, twist the two pieces while together for ANY reason.
Also, since the Genius pen (and many other brands of non-Wacom pens) uses a battery, it made the pen feel a bit fat and clunky in my hand -- and I'm a big dude. Maybe you won't care or notice. For $40 bucks, I could get used to it. But if I were some petite little artist using this thing for a substantial amount of time, I imagine it might feel a little like I was handling some goofy circus clown pen. Again, it's semi-subjective, so you might feel differently.
Lastly, there was more springiness in the pen's point than I'm used to, allowing for a fair amount of compression, which made its handling feel awkward for drawing. Again, maybe I could've gotten used to it.
Mouse:
Again, less substantial than Wacom mice. Worked okay. It had this middle mouse rocking switch instead of a rolling wheel, which I didn't care for.
Manuals and Software:
Software for a tablet is important because you frequently use different settings in different programs. The Genius tablet's manuals and software are weird and clunky, lack many customization features I'm accustomed to, and using it you immediately are aware that the software was made on the cheap. It has frequent goofy English mis-translations, typos, and grammatical errors that just don't say "quality product".
Compatibility and Performance:
Its pressure sensitivity seemed to work or not work depending on what program I was working in. I was using it in high-end graphics software, sure, but at least the drivers should have been relatively bulletproof, right? The final straw that got this product boxed back up and returned to the seller was that ultimately I simply could not get pressure sensitivity to work with ZBrush, my primary work program.
To Sum Up:
For the money, the Genius MousePen 8x6 Graphic Tablet offers as large a work surface as I could find. The pressure sensitivity and tracking weren't bad, but were not what you'd want for a serious hobbyist or professional artist. Its construction is flimsy, and the drivers and software are cheap and far less than I'd be willing to put up with. But you get what you pay for.
This tablet would be a great, affordable birthday party gift for someone else's 10 year old kid who likes doing art with MS Paint or something. For my own kid, I'd be inclined to spend more money and get a used Wacom Intuos or other professional quality Wacom graphics tablet. (I've not used their cheaper "Bamboo" line of tablets, so I can't speak to their quality.)
This tablet would also be fine for an adult who just wants to doodle, use hand writing in programs such as OneNote, or prefers a pen to a mouse.
For a professional artist, serious art hobbyist, or art student, if I literally had nothing more than $40 bucks or so to spend, and I needed a graphics tablet, I would borrow some cash from someone and buy a used Wacom before getting this thing. A 10 year old Wacom is easily superior to this tablet for doing real art -- in its durability, tracking, ergonomics, and most especially drivers and software.
Digital camera Review: Cheap, usable tablet
Summary: 4 Stars
I went in not expecting much of a 50 buck tablet and got more than what I expected. It isn't up to the ease of use as my old no longer function Wacom tablets, but this is less than half the price of their entry level tablet and has about twice the drawing area.
It takes more pressure to get close to the 1028 levels out of the tablet than I'd like and I am completely underwhelmed with the mouse. The fact that the tablet is locked into absolute mode is the biggest drawback of this mouse.
But it does do what it claims, does it more or less reasonably .
Digital camera Review: Cheapest 8"X6" tablet.
Summary: 4 Stars
If this were twice as expensive, that is if amazon sold it at its MSRP, it would only be worth about two stars, probably less, but as it is this thing is a fairly good value. The PDF manual included on the installation CD is hardly useful and filled with the sort of grammatical anomalies that one might expect to find on a paper sleeve containing chopsticks, and the instructions are about as useful for operating the tablet software as they would be for chopsticks. There seems to be no option to program the "programmable" "Hot-Cell" shortcuts; this is not really an issue; you likely won't need them anyway. There is a learning curve with this and all tablets as your hand adapts to the spatial challenges of drawing at a distance. There is no eraser on the stylus, and the mouse, which only operates when it is atop the tablet, and stylus require one AAA battery apiece. The batteries are included and installed prior to packaging which seems potentially hazardous to the battery's lifespan. The software and drivers function perfectly on my WinXP system and the product works well with Adobe Photoshop and Flash.Digital camera Review: Chintsy - Poor support
Summary: 1 Stars
If you're serious about using a tablet, do NOT buy this one.
NONE of Genius's tablets support multiple monitors. They say it is a "licensing" issue. Yeah, right.
Overall, this does have a cheap feel to it, but it is inexpensive. But the mouse is smaller than a standard mouse, so I don't plan to use it. The biggest problem is that the stylus only works on the primary monitor, and anyone with multiple monitors will tell you that they don't EDIT on that one because of all the O/S stuff on that monitor.
Besides, you can't use the included software (like Annotate on Word), unless of course you want to do EVERYTHING on your main monitor.
If they had mentioned on the product specifications that it only works on one monitor, I would not have bought it in the first place.
Digital camera Review: Completely broke too soon and cheaply made
Summary: 2 Stars
I'll start this review by saying this product was very good when it worked. It had tons of configurable quick keys and a very large drawing surface. It was very responsive and the pressure sensitivity worked flawlessly. I was able to find Vista "Beta" drivers and they worked and integrated perfectly with Vista.
The included software is very old-style and poorly made. It does work, but it's like it was made in 1998. I found my existing applications and Vista's integrated features were far better than this software I lost the CD so I wasn't able to install it again - you can't redownload it from the website.
After 6 months of use, however, the tablet gradually started to break. It was recognized by the computer and then it randomly got disconected. I unplugged and replugged and it worked for 5 minutes more or so. I tried a different computer and it had the same problem. The next few days I was having the same issues. Strangely, when I opened their control panel it recognized and the instant I closed it it didn't. It kept being inconsistent to the point where it wasn't even recognized by the computer at all anymore. It even said Unknown Device at times.
I opened up the tablet and... the main logic board was TAPED on to the back of the unit. That's right - TAPED - with regular transparent tape. Everything looked fine and I wasn't able to fix it.
I'm going to stay away from Genius and get myself a nice Wacom, which is probably a ton better than this piece of junk. Stay away from the Genius brand, specifically this tablet.