Wacom Intuos5 tablet
For photo manipulation, a tablet is an essential tool, and this is the premiere choice. Because it's a bit pricey for amateurs, it makes a great treat as a gift. If you don't want to spend quite so much, it comes in smaller sizes, or you can opt for one of Wacom's cheaper consumer-oriented Bamboo series.
The good: The redesigned Wacom Intuos5 fixes some drawbacks from the already-excellent previous version, plus adds multitouch operation to an already impressive bag of input tricks.
The bad: There's still no interface for sharing/migrating saved settings or allowing third parties to provide preconfigured application-specific settings. Also, the heads-up display trigger is a little too sensitive.
The bottom line: Though it doesn't add any new graphics-specific capabilities over its predecessor, the Wacom Intuos5 input tablet remains a must-have for digital brushworkers.
October 31, 2012 3:00 PM PDT
Photo by: Sarah Tew/CNET
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