My intuos 4 pen recently went missing somehow (I blame her dog, she blames my cat). Given the low price of the deco 03 (not that much more than replacing the wacom pen alone), and the fact that it could get to me quicker than an intuos pen, I decided to take a chance with it. I've only had it for a month, so I'll revisit my review after I put some more hours on it, but thus far it has far exceeded my expectations. The build quality has me hoping xp pen makes a cintiq competitor soon, as I'd buy one in a heartbeat. I'm a semi-professional artist, so I use my tablet a lot, though it's not my full time gig, so it's not getting 8 hours of use per day. Over the last month it's probably averaged about 1-4 hours per day of use, and it's holding up well. The drawing surface shows wear, but nothing unreasonable.
Pros:
Price-- Larger than comparable wacom for less than half the price.
Accuracy and Pressure control -- fantastic. Seems as accurate as my wacom, and the pressure sensitivity is more than I can possibly utilize.
Drivers -- I expected some problems here, but they installed fine, have worked without issue the entire month, and allow for a lot of control...
Build quality-- is very high. I expected it to feel cheap, but it really doesn't.
Very light/thin. I never took my Intuos 4 anywhere because it was juuust a bit too clunky to drag around, but this thing is super thin and very light. I regularly throw it in my backpack to work away from home...
Cons: (all are minor nitpicks)
No barrel roll or tilt-- This is not an issue for most of the stuff I do for work, but when Im just painting for myself I really miss tilt. I hope xppen adds this functionality at some point.
Button binding -- The only thing the drivers lack is the ability to bind *anything* you want to the buttons. The options are pretty good, so it's probably not an issue for for 99% of the things people will want to bind, but photoshop drag-to-resize tool requires alt+left click (and can't be remapped for some reason), which you can't bind with the xp pen drivers (wacoms do let you).
Pen tips -- You get a bunch, but there's just one type. I'd like options for different hardnesses to find one that really feels good to me. The basic tip is ok, but it has a very specific, smooth plastic-on-plastic feel that isn't my favorite. Also, the replacement tips are fairly hard to pull out of their case. I had to get needle-nose pliers to pull one out when I needed to replace the first tip, which wore a flat spot in a month of moderate use. That was a lot faster than I expected. I can probably extend that out by being more conscious about rolling the pen occasionally so as to not draw on the same spot every time, but time will tell if this is a real issue.
Pen distance -- One thing that took a little getting used to is that the tablet doesn't read the pen location until you get fairly close to the surface of the tablet (I'd guess 1/2 to 3/4 inch, but I didn't measure it). At first this was really frustrating because I was used to the wacom which has a much further read distance, so frequently when I'd pull off my drawing to use a button function, the pen would stop registering as I was striking hotkeys, and things would get mucked up. I'm getting used to it, so it's mostly not an issue, but it would be a nice quality of life improvement if they could increase the read distance even a little bit.
Pen buttons -- The last minor nitpick is that the bottom barrel button on the pen is too flat along the side of the pen. When drawing it's easy to kinda lose where the buttons are, and hard to locate the by feel. I'd rather they had a bit bigger profile to rest your finger on/let you find them easier...
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