- Hello there and thanks for joining me.
I'm Aaron Rutten, and in this video
I'm going to be reviewing the XP Pen Artist 15.6 Pro.
That's coming up next.
(disco music)
Quick disclaimer
This video is not sponsored by XP Pen
but they did ask me if I wanted
to review this tablet and I said yes.
As always all opinions in this video are my own.
Let's start by taking a look at a quick overview
of the XP Pen Artist 15.6 Pro.
The Artist 15.6 Pro is a display tablet
that you can draw onto with a pressure sensitive pen.
As it's name implies, the active drawing
area on this tablet is 15.6 inches diagonally
and it has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 HD.
The pen is battery-free and cordless
with over 8,000 pressure levels.
On the exterior of the tablet
there are eight programmable express keys
and a radial dial that you can use
to perform different shortcuts and commands.
This tablet connects through HDMI
for the video and USB for the tablet input.
Now let's move on to some of the
pros and cons of XP Pen Artist 15.6 Pro.
Let's start with the pros.
As far as the pen goes, it actually
has a pretty decent battery-free pen
with a nice contoured grip.
Unlike many of the alternatives
out there, this pen supports 60 degrees of pen tilt.
The pen tilt works okay, but the transitions
do feel a little abrupt.
In Photoshop, pen tilt only works
with the legacy brushes.
Pen tilt works well enough in Krita
to do a basic drawing using the tilted pencil.
So that's really a nice feature to see on this pen.
The pen also comes with a sturdy,
but excessively large pen case
and eight replacement nibs.
New to this version of the Artist 15.6 Pro
is a red dial which you can use
to zoom in and out or resize your brush.
You can set this dial and the express keys
to do all kinds of things in different applications.
Moving on to the screen.
Some of the things I like about the screen
are that it's really bright and
there are buttons on the side to
adjust the screen brightness.
The screen itself is laminated
and bonded which improves parallax reduction.
And there's an anti-glare film
which has been pre-applied that
works really well to defuse reflections.
The Artist 15.6 connects with a
single USB-C cable which splits out
to HDMI video, power, and USB which is really nice.
Overall, the tablet is pretty thin.
It's only 11 milimeters thick and it's very lightweight.
Getting into the software, the control panel
is decent and it provides a lot of functions.
And the drivers were easy to install.
And now let's talk about some of the cons.
The screen feel on my skin is okay.
It's not quite as nice as the etched
glass I've felt on other tablets.
If you don't like the way that the screen feels
on your skin, you can use this free
anti-fouling glove that comes included.
I personally don't like to wear a glove.
The pen tip feels slippery on the surface of the tablet.
The tablet surface does not have a paper-like feel.
Because of the screen technology that's being used,
the screen distorts a little bit near
the edges when you press down hard.
You'll also get some distortion
underneath your pen cursor.
Now the color gamut on this display is fairly high.
It's at around 84% of the Adobe RGB
or 88% NTSC which is about 120% of SRGB.
However, the color accuracy is poor,
this display definitely needs to be calibrated.
Moving on to some cons for the pen.
The pen does not have an eraser.
Although the pen supports over
8,000 levels of pressure,
the pressure sensitivity is a little bit jumpy.
And what I mean by jumpy, is the
transitions from light to medium to dark are
a little abrupt.
It's not a nice smooth transition.
This can make it very difficult
to get consistent line widths.
And to get smooth transitions when
you go from high to low opacity.
Also the pen is a little bit laggy
when you're drawing on screen.
And the line quality can sometimes
suffer from wavy lines, abrupt tapering
on the end of strokes, and abrupt shifts in the line width.
The thing I noticed the most when drawing
is that it feels very difficult to get light pressure.
When you press down lightly, you don't get anything
and it's not until you apply a lot more pressure
that you actually start to draw with your lightest pressure.
Something definitely feels off
about the lower end of the pen pressure,
but setting a custom pressure curve helped a bit.
Another thing I noticed is that
when I tilt the pen, the cursor
strays really far away from the pen tip
even if I calibrate the pen.
As far as the quality of the pen,
it's a decent pen.
The pen feels a little bit light
and the rubber grip doesn't feel
quite as soft as Wacom's pen.
But the grip is built into the pen
and it doesn't look like it'll
come off easily, so that's good.
Moving on to the build quality of the tablet.
The outer shell is plastic.
The plastic feels a little thin
and cheap and not very durable.
If I bend the tablet it is flexible.
But as I mentioned earlier, it is fairly lightweight.
While there is a pen stand built into the pen case,
there is no pen holder on the tablet itself.
You can however rest the pen on the stand.
Speaking of the stand,
the stand is very cheap plastic
and it only has one position
which is not very comfortable.
The stand does not attach to the tablet
securely, which is unfortunate.
The stand should really be able
to attach to the back of the tablet.
If we flip the tablet over we can see
that there aren't any mounting holes
for a stand or for a VESA mount.
So that means that you wouldn't
be able to attach this to an Ergotron arm.
The stand is fairly stable, it really
depends on how you use it.
Now I mentioned earlier, I like
the USB-C connection to the tablet.
But the cable is not very elegant.
It's a lot of cables connected together
and it's really kind of messy.
I also think the cable itself could be a bit longer.
It does come with a USB cable extender
and you can definitely get a longer extension,
but I suppose for some people that won't really matter.
While the USB-C cable connection
is very simple, the connection itself is a little bit weak.
I'd concerned about it breaking
or becoming disconnected by accident.
Moving on to some cons for the software.
I was not able to open the display settings
from the control panel, but that might
be able to be fixed with the driver update.
Otherwise, the driver and control panel worked fine.
And now for my conclusion.
So far the XP Pen Artist 15.6 Pro
is the best Wacom Cintiq alternative that I've tried.
It's definitely a huge improvement
over the last Cintiq alternative that I tried.
But still falls short on some key features
such as color accuracy, build quality,
the feel of the surface, and the line quality.
So there you go,
that's a look at the XP Pen Artist 15.6 Pro.
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Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.
(disco music)