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Comment by phaus | Hacker News Reader

>It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution.

It is admirable, but their work towards a solution will be fruitless. N-Trig's pressure sensitive stylus technology is vastly inferior to Wacom. Sure, most people can't tell the difference, but most artists can. Sure, artists can still produce professional quality work with an N-Trig stylus, but the experience of using an N-Trig stylus is substandard.

Microsoft improved nearly every aspect of the Surface Pro 3, but their switch to N-Trig was extraordinarily stupid. I'd rather have a slightly thicker, slightly more expensive device than one with a less than perfect stylus. I hope they continue to improve things by switching back to Wacom in the future.

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On the other hand, the N-trig stylus works accurately at the edge of the screen. You can't say the same about Wacom's, and the issue is made worse by the fact that most desktop software puts toolbars full of tiny mouse targets around the edge of the screen.

With their Bamboo/Intuos/Cintiq products, Wacom can avoid the accuracy falloff problems by including an enormous margin around the edge of the active area. On a portable device like the Surface Pro 2, they weren't able to do that and it showed.

There are certainly tradeoffs in going to N-trig, but I don't think it's fair to portray it as inferior to Wacom's tech in every area but cost.

The SP2 Wacom setup was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, in my experience -- accuracy was terrible in the corners / near the edges, and parallax was a serious issue, if you did not write/draw with the pen perpendicular to the surface of the screen, there was a significant offset from the tip of the pen to where the line was actually drawn. These were bad enough to turn me (and at least one professional artist that I know) off from buying one.

The move to N-Trig hypothetically fixes both of these. Early reviews/videos say that corner accuracy is greatly improved, and the lack of a separate digitizer layer allows a thinner optical stack, reducing parallax (and allowing the device overall to be thinner).

Driver support has historically been an issue, but msft seems to be improving things significantly.

There are fewer levels of sensitivity and hovering doesn't work quite as well, but I am overall reasonably optimistic about the switch.

Website is having some stylesheet trouble for me, but Surface Pro Artist says they have a decent handle on the driver compatibility. The update isn't generally released yet, but it's a significant fix.

http://surfaceproartist.com/blog/2014/6/9/n-trig-closing-win...

The possibility also remains that Wacom did not want the kind of business that the Surface brings to them. The surface is the first product that does a reasonably good job of cannibalizing cintiq sales. I would expect their margins on Cintiq to be higher than selling a digitizer component to Microsoft. I think Wacom is in a really tough place here - they have to balance between limiting access to their crown jewels while also making sure that ntrig doesnt make too many inroads as a legitimate alternative.

Absolutely nothing to do with that. Wacom would love to be in the SP3. But weight, thickness, cooling, display quality (and writing feel due to extra layers between the glass and display panel), and battery life all conspired against them. The N-Trig solution trades off some drawing precision (at a degree very few will notice) and the requirement of a battery in the pen for improvements to all of those things. Seems like a no-brainer.

When I was at MS folks were working super closely with Atmel (touch panel vendor for most early Win8/RT tablets) and really pushed the limits of their technology. There was a tight feedback loop there and I personally had found issues which eventually were solved via iterations of back-and-forth with Atmel and with software tweaks to work around hardware limitations.

It may not happen over night, but I suspect they're doing the same thing with N-Trig and pushing them to improve the experience in a way which other PC/tablet vendors never have or would. So don't assume that just because other OEMs haven't cared enough to get the most out of N-Trig's text that Surface doesn't have a shot at doing better.

>It is admirable, but their work towards a solution will be fruitless.

Any Microsoft employees listening: Go ahead and pack it up. Someone on the internet has told you all you need to hear. It's fruitless. Literally nothing you do will work, as this post has clearly pointed out. Look to this non sequitor full of opinion presented as fact for all the info you need: Until you switch to the hardware that OP knows is superior, your work will be for naught. Sorry.

It is a fact that both Wacom and N-Trig digitizers have different sets of advantages and disadvantages. It is a fact that the Surface Pro 3 can't completely eliminate its chosen technology's disadvantages. I never claimed that the entire Surface product line was doomed to failure, after all, the world doesn't revolve around digital artists.

As a couple of people pointed out, Wacom has a major disadvantage as well. It really sucks that it loses its accuracy at the edges of the screen, but in spite of that I still find the experience far superior to using an N-Trig stylus. I have come to this conclusion after using many different devices with different kinds of digitizers over the last decade. I also frequent a few of the major online digital art communities, and they all seem to agree with me. Perhaps the N-Trig fans are just quiet, but I'm inclined to think the lack of representation is due to the fact that artists enjoy using Wacom products.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to be so childishly hostile. I wasn't aware that expressing an opinion in an anonymous online community where people gather to have casual conversations was frowned upon.

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