Wacom Cintiq 21UX
For the last year I have been seriously considering buying me one of the Wacom Cintiq 21UX drawing tablets. The videos on YouTube of these things are massively cool, and I think that something like this is more along the lines of something that I could use to do digital art. The old Wacom I have is a serial model, so the drawing quality in Photoshop is pretty poor — stair-stepped lines due to poor throughput. However, one of these Cintiqs looks to be just the ticket.

Having to do some of the art for the VBAM books has forced me to get a bit better with my art — I am still a rank amateur, and would never argue otherwise. However, something like this would allow me to really have fun and create some pretty nice artwork, I think. I could never do any of this with the mouse, and attempt to do so have always been a disaster. However, being able to actually see the artwork and manipulate on a tablet LCD would overcome the visual disconnect for me.

The tablet is $2500 plus shipping… and I do need a business expense for the year. There are a few cons to getting this right now, though. The first is that I just got done loaning $12,000 to family members, so I have less cash available right now than I would like. I also just paid up my Qwest phone/internet for the year (~$1,200). But I still have enough cash so that the $2,500 really wouldn’t be an overwhelming expense, either. The other disadvantage is that I would have to buy another PCIe video card to stick in my machine in order to have another video adapter to hook this tablet into. I could put it in place of my second LCD, but I am not sure I really want to do that. I guess I could… and I did have Roy build my desk with that in mind, but still…

I am on the fence about it, but I will probably end up buying one. Though, if I do buy one, I am going to have to put a lot more time into improving my art skills so that I actually get full use out of it; otherwise, it will just end up being a $2,500 paperweight.