Hey everybody, I finally did it...

I broke down and blew a ton of cash on a Wacom Cintiq 21UX and it is the best piece of equipment I have bought in years.

For the past 10 years I have been using 2 monitors and a Wacom tablet and it has been a tried and true method for working. A few years ago I looked into the Wacom Cintiq and was really intrigued, but because of the price ($2499.95) and the lack of availability to find some place that I could try one, I just chalked it up as a dream toy and moved on.

I lucked out and had a string of lucritive freelance projects, so I decided to look into the Wacom Cintiq again. After reading the reviews on the new 21" Cintiq and talking to my friend Sung, who uses one at Bioware, I decide to just go for it and invest.

All I can say is it is amazing! I love it. It has totally changed the way I illustrate on my Mac.
One change I didn't expect to make when switching to the Cintiq is the decision to get rid of my second monitor... that was something I thought I would never do?... but after a few days of working on the Cintiq, I found my second monitor to become more of a hinderance than a help, since the only way to use the second monitor was to grab the mouse and slide over to it. After working directly on the screen for a while I found this to be irratating, and since CS2 has the pallet docks, it was faster to just tap on and off of them then to grab for the mouse all the time... so bye bye monitor #2.

Now don't misunderstand me, I wouldn't mind having another Cintiq tablet to dock all my pallets on to just reach over and tap on with my pen, but unless some one wants to join the "Get Joshua Janes a 2nd Cintiq cause he's a spioled bastard compaign" it's not going to happen any time soon.

As far as using the Cintiq it felt odd at first working on the screen. I was talking to my friend Kevin when it first arrived. I told him that it reminded me when I first learned to scuba dive, it just felt unatural when you first do it. When I say unantural, I mean from the working on a computer stand point, because as soon as you let that go and embrace the Cintiq and use it in the way you work when you illustrate at your drawing table, it's the most natural feeling in the world. I found that I work a lot faster using the Cintiq and it's a lot less of a mechanical feeling of working on my art.

The only way that this could get any better is to have the ability to manipulate the screen using your fingures as well. It would truely be perfect then.

Over all the sensitivity of the screen seems a lot better than the Intuos 2 tablets and the ability to spin the Cintiq's screen like you would a piece of paper when you draw so that you can keep your normal brush stroke motion of your hand is great. That was always a complaint I had about the normal Wacom tablets.

Well, hopefully Wacom will be sending me a big fat endorsement check after this butt kissing post, but it is definitely a piece of a equipment that every digital artist should have. Make sure if you buy one from Wacom to mention my name...

It won't help you on the price, but maybe... just maybe, I will get one of those fat endorsement checks from Wacom.

Ha... yeah, you guessed it... the freelance money is already all spent.

-Josh