Long Nguyen

Wacom Bamboo Tablet

The scroll ball on my Mighty Mouse wasn’t working very well. Sometimes, it would scroll down, sometimes, it wouldn’t, so I needn’t a new mouse. What I like about the Mighty Mouse its ability to scroll in every direction; up, down, left, right, and even in diagonals. As far as I know, there is no other mouse that can do that. There are mice that can scroll up, down, left, and right, but not in diagonals; that just isn’t good enough for my productivity, so came the Wacom Bamboo tablet.

Merely after a few seconds of using it, I wondered why I never bought one sooner. It is very intuitive to use as it should be. Using the tablet is no different than using a pen, because that is what it is.

There are four customizable buttons and a scrolling circle. The tablet connects via USB, although I wish it supported WiFi or Bluetooth.

To move the cursor, the pen must hover over the tablet. Contact between the pen and the tablet is the equivalent of a click. There are two buttons on the pen and either of them can be set to the user’s desires. I kept the default settings which are: top button is the right click and the bottom button is used to pan and scroll.

The magic of the Wacom tablet comes in when using softwares like Photoshop in which drawing is natural and pressure between the pen and tablet is of great importance as less pressure means thinner lines and more means thicker. There are many tips and trick on Wacom’s website concerning Photoshop.

I was warned against buying the cheapest model, but this was a great purchase. Like I said before, I wonder why I haven’t bought one earlier. As far as I know, it is much more reliable than a mouse and certainly easier to clean.