Wacom’s Inkling Captures What You Draw On Paper Digitally

Thanks for the info. This sounds like a really interesting product.

But if this new pen is not accurate to less than 1mm, then it will not work for sketches like the example drawing (in the link). 1mm is a lot when dealing with drawings of that scale.

I hadn't realized quite how many of the special-paper-free digital pens were out there now - last time I'd looked, the pens needed special paper and used a pen-tip camera for sensing (basically a special-purpose optical mouse).

Here's a collection of them: http://digital-pen-review.toptenreviews.com/

Interestingly, the last three pens in the comparison table all do look very similar to Wacom's offering. I wonder whether the Wacom pen is using the same technology (or is maybe even made by the same manufacturer behind the scenes?)

In any case, I reckon the Wacom name will help them sell, possibly helping promote them to artists wanting to sketch on the move rather than (as the linked comparison mentions) for business purposes.

Most of those digital pens used specially printed paper which had machine-readable dot patterns. This looks like it takes a different approach compatible with any paper/notebook.

Sounds like a great toy for those people who like to sketch notes in meetings etc. I wonder if it can replay the drawing as an animation?

Those are fun, but as an artist I could never deal with the mental dissonance of my eyes watching the result on the screen while drawing somewhere else.

The Wacom Cintiq (http://www.wacom.com/en/Products/Cintiq.aspx) fixes that by providing a pressure-sensitive display, so you see what you draw. Apparently Pixar is using a ton of these. But it's also hideously expensive.

Ironic since we were in the market first as Inkling (http://inklingmarkets.com) in 2006, then the well-funded "Inkling" (inkling.com) came along who ignored our claims about trademark, and now the Wacom Inkling tablet. Guess it's just a cool name. :)

Trademark is broken down into classes of goods and services. You can have multiple companies having the same trademark name in different classes. Check http://uspto.gov for details.

Layers, automatic vectors, pressure sensitive tips... not really stuff that you can trivially replicate with just paper/pen.

This is actually the question the product answers. A lot of graphic designers like to start designing on paper, then move to Illustrator or PS for the final work. The classic way to do this is to scan in your sketch and make it a layer, and essentially start over with digital art on top of it.

Inkling lets you split your sketch into multiple layers as you're sketching it. Say you're drawing a character for a game, and the character can be carrying things. You can sketch the two together, with overlapping lines, but keep the character and the carried thing on separate layers. All without having to find the boundaries and snip carefully to separate them in PS.

Sheer convenience, too: if you draw with this pen, the drawing is already scanned, rather than having to dig out the scanner (which, in our household, lives in a pile of other gadgets under a desk) and fiddle with TWAIN settings to get stuff into Photoshop. Plus you can work on the move if you have your laptop and a sketchpad with you - of course, you can do this with a regular graphics tablet, but from my (hobby) artist partner's comments, it's much more fun drawing on paper than on a tiny graphics tablet.