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Hi,

here we go again, a review of an Aldi product

At the recent PMA, I was eyeing the new Wacom Intuos4 Tablets but my wallet didn't like them. Given that I hadn't used one previously, I was reluctant to spend that kind of money. Aldi to the rescue: they have 12x9 tablet that they sell for $79. Sure it isn't a Wacom Intuos but the price is also a lot less.

I got one and found that it doesn't have Mac drivers, only XP and Vista. It is a rebadged tablet and Adesso have the same one so I downloaded the drivers from:
http://www.adesso.com/tablet_drivers.asp

There you go, got the tablet working on my Mac OS X 10.5.7. It has a nice little application to customise the various touch-keys on the tablet.

Seems to work fine so far. There are also a number of applications for Windows, I may use those when I run Parallels on my Mac.

Next I'll try it out with Capture NX2 and Photoshop.

Just a quick review in case some of you may want to get one at Aldi. Not sure until when they will have them on sale for.

Cheers,

André

fantastic, i bought one of these when it first came out in 2004(ish), and it lasted me ages until i lost it in a box of stuff during a move.

i will go pick up one this afternoon.

thanks!

That is really cheap! Does it have pressure effects?

I thought my Wacom Bamboo 6X8 [highly recommended by the way] was cheap at $250 odd...

Thanks for the heads up Radar!

surenj wrote:That is really cheap! Does it have pressure effects?

I'm new to this but the specs say that it has "Pen Pressure: 1024 levels"

HTH, André

In Aldi @ southland (Melbourne) today they had them for $79 !!

I'm running tiger 10.4.11 on an imac hoping it will work

I think from a forum some time ago people were saying a downside was batteries in the pen, that was about a year ago maybe it's changed ??

I have also just bought one and hope to install it and try this weekend. An acquintance in another camera club bought one a good couple of years ago and thought it was OK.
It's really a cheap price to try something new and see if it is workable with what I do.

What a great heads up! I bought one from Aldi about 2 years ago for my Lin/Win box and had not really investigated it for my new iMac.
Wrapped to get it working with the suggested drivers. Thanks heaps!

If it's the Medion P82012 "Design USB Graphics Pad" we are talking about here, they are selling it for $59 at the moment (not sure when the sale ends though). The ads did say the original price is $79.

Cheers.

Edit : I'm surprised that Ubuntu 9.04 (Linux) actually work with this tablet out of the box without the need for any drivers.

aswcheng wrote:If it's the Medion P82012 "Design USB Graphics Pad" we are talking about here, they are selling it for $59 at the moment (not surer when the sale ends though). The ads did say the original price is $79.
Cheers.

Indeed. The back page of the current catalogue has it as a "Clearance Item" so the price has dropped to $59. I just picked one up from Aldi at Strathfield (Meadowbank were out).

so Radar now that you have been using it for a couple of weeks what do you think ?? thumbs up or down ?

My 6 year old is using it right now with a paint program and is having an absolute blast.

I've tried it with Photoshop and it works very well. I think achieving proficiency is a different issue. Obviously doing stuff with a keyboard and mouse is completely different so getting used to this is hard.

I'm guessing that having some drawing talent (which I do not have) would help. But overall, for $59 I'm not going to complain - I think it's excellent for a beginner who wants to experiment and give this a try.

SuperJT wrote:Obviously doing stuff with a keyboard and mouse is completely different so getting used to this is hard.

I agree, it takes a while to get used to a tablet. And while this particular one doesn't seem to be of the same quality as the professional tablets, it's a great starter at $59. If only I have some talent as an artist.. )

Cheers.