Wacom Bamboo Quick Review

One piece of essential equipment for the digital darkroom is a pen tablet. Wacom are far and away the leaders in this field. Years ago, when I was a graphics designer, I had an A4 tablet. For photo retouching there is no real need for such a huge (and expensive) piece of kit,. Until recently I was using a Wacom Graphire 4 tablet. When the pen finally stopped working I decided, rather than order a replacement pen, to update to a new tablet: the clear plastic surface of the Graphire was looking distinctly scratched and ugly.

Looking on the Wacom website, I was intrigued to see a new model, priced below the Graphire, called the Bamboo. The blurb aimed it squarely at "office" users for the exploitation of the pen features now built in to Vista. The text carefully avoided mentioning its use for photo editing, but a quick study of the specs showed that it is functionally (almost) identical to the Graphire and more or less the same size. At half the price of the Graphire, I thought it was worth a try so I ordered one.

Wacom must be trying to win an award for sexy packaging - the Bamboo comes in a matte-black box that wouldn't shame a diamond necklace. The tablet itself is also very handsome, with a "piano black" strip across the top of the matte-black pen surface.

As I suspected, it works just like the Graphire. The only "missing" feature I can identify is that the eraser on the top of the pen is not pressure-sensitive: I never used the one on the Graphire anyway. In fact, the Bamboo has features that the Graphire doesn't: four large buttons and a circular touch-pad. These are all programmable so you can make them do pretty much anything. I've altered the default assignments on mine to give myself some handy Photoshop aids.

All in all, I like the Bamboo much better than I did the Graphire. It looks better, has those programmable buttons, is cheaper, has a better stand for the pen than the Graphire and is half the price of the Graphire.

The only "silly" in the design is the USB cable. The Graphire had a permanently attached wire: the Bamboo has a miniature USB socket on the top edge at the left. Why would you ever need to unplug it? I don't understand why they added to the manufacturing cost in this way: it just doesn't make any sense. And worst of all, the plug on the USB cable sticks out just enough to make it vulnerable to being broken, as well as making it impossible to butt the tablet neatly up against the bottom edge of my keyboard.

The driver appears to co-exist amicably with my Logitech MX Revolution mouse (another GREAT piece of kit). I have a dual-monitor setup, so I've mapped the tablet's surface to the main monitor only. When I'm Photoshoping, I have all my palettes on the secondary monitor and use the mouse to click on that screen and the pen on the main screen. You quickly develop the knack of "parking" the pen by swivelling it in your fingers so you can use the mouse without needing to put the pen down. The technique is impossible to describe but completely intuitive in practice.

If you're serious about editing photos on a computer then you NEED a tablet. Even the simplest of retouching is made easier and more pleasurable. And the pressure-sensitivity of the pen is a boon when retouching, ensuring much better and more controllable results than the on/off nature of a mouse button.

Unless you're into painting or heavy-duty graphic design on your computer, save big-time on the cost of any of the "professional" models in Wacom's line-up and buy the humble little Bamboo!