Animation Insider

SurfaceProartist.com is reporting a review for a relatively unknown new Cintiq competitor called the ThinkVision LT1423p Touch Mobile Monitor and while they seem to like it more or less there are other reviews on the Lenovo forums are iffy. I will say that some of those reviews seem to stem from not understanding the device.

The ThinkVision LT1423p is a 13″ penabled touch screen tablet which you connect to your PC or Mac to draw on much like a Wacom Cintiq albeit smaller and not as reliable as you’ll see below. The device apparently uses two USB3 to power it so if you don’t HAVE USB 3.0 you’re done with this mini review right now. It also appears to work wirelessly but the reviews on that were poor so I wouldn’t trust it. The pen is total crap (like the Lenovo Helix’s) too but I would imagine any Wacom penabled pen will work so that’s a relative non issue. I have always been impressed with Lenovo’s build quality and the video supports this.  The video reviewer talks quite a bit about troubles with the drivers, which is odd to me since Lenovo usually places quite a bit of attention to detail with their own software. This makes me feel like it’s almost a throwaway device and they don’t support it much which worries me a bit.

I’m actually pretty impressed with the drawing lag or lack thereof, which seems to be very low if you check out the video at around 10:29 or this point and it’s one of the reasons I’m even pointing to this device at all.

The corner tests seemed good as well, and what I mean by that is that you can draw all the way to the very corner of the device without losing connection of th pen or having the cursor stray from the pen’s point which isn’t always the best even on Cintiqs I’ve tried, especially the 12″ one. This being a touch enabled monitor, I’m pretty sure the Palm rejection is crap since no one seems to be able to get that right yet. Luckily on a PC it’s sort of a non issue since you can disable to Touch driver, but on the Mac, I’m not so sure how you’d disable it but you could use a Smudgeguard glove to disable the touch which is actually a decent tradeoff and works beautifully.

The forums led me to the Youtube video above which were fairly positive albeit some hiccups with driver issues.

“I’ve confirmed pressure sensitivity works in Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro (x86), Paint Tool SAI, OneNote, Sticky Notes, and Sculptris. I’m guessing this isn’t much of a surprise for any of you.

All in all, this seems like a solid product. I have an Intuos 4 Large and use the monitors shown in the youtube video as a reference to measure my subjectivity. The screen looks great, and is responsive. I have detected some parallax effect, but that was anticipated. It is worse when the stylus is not tangent (90 degrees) to the tablet surface. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by how little the offset was after calibration. My biggest hardware complaint I would have to be the dinky stylus, but thankfully other compatible ones are available.

EDIT: Eraser and second side-switch functionality do not work on this device, even if the stylus has those features itself. This is based on testimony from others in this thread, as well as my own. I spoke with Wacom representatives in person, and they told me that the device supports those features, but it’s in Lenovo’s court as to whether or not to activate them. ”

 

You can read more of that discussion here.

All in all it seems like if you can get past the driver issues at $600 bucks,  it’s a decent alternative to a Wacom Cintiq.

You can buy a ThinkVision LT1423p here on Amazon.