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Comment by wanderingstan | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a professional arts it but spend a fair amount of time in Photoshop. Years ago I got a low end Wacom but never used it after the first week. Too much hassle to pull it out, and I never got the hang of looking at the screen while moving my hand.

Astropad is a good fit for me. I already own an iPad; and for <$100 I get Astropad and a pressure sensitive pen. This means the draw-on-screen experience of the $1K Cintiq and no extra peripheral to dig out.

I saw on other sites where someone complained that "pro" tablets give 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity while ipad pens give only 1024, but I can't tell a difference. (Esp when the LCD only has 256 levels per color channel!)

The geeky side of me is more impressed with how they got such low latency and high fidelity over the same wifi pipe used by other screen-mapping apps (Duet).

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Technically, iPads have no pressure sensitivity due to the basic/standard digitizer within. They don't have a proper pressure-sensitive digitizer that works with a stylus like a Wacom Cintiq or a Microsoft Surface Pro. An iPad can fake it using a stylus that has a lot more beef built into the stylus itself to support some pressure sensitivity. But it still needs to have a big fat contact with the iPad digitizer itself since it isn't stylus-compatible. It will work with hot dog styli though... aka fat styli that simulate a finger.

Yeah, I was talking about the 3rd party pens. An artist at my company has several of the iPad pens and I was impressed with how small the tips actually are. again im not a pro artist, but they were far superior to a finger and good enough for me. (I'm curious to show Astropad to the artist on Monday and see his reaction. He'd used the pens just for sketching on the iPad til now.)

Perhaps off-topic, but you might want to check out the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain."

One of the things it teaches, if you're interested, is how to draw without looking at the page. It's incredibly useful if you're ever drawing from life, and will probably lessen the weirdness of using a tablet.

I have a Wacom. Haven't used it for a while now but used to some years ago. The way I got used to drawing while looking at the monitor was that when I first got it, I spent a few days drawing only simple shapes like circles and boxes as well as trying to lift the pen and pick some other spot on the screen that I wanted to draw the next shape at. It was very hard in the beginning but got much easier fast.

I was messing around with this the other day and I had a video playing on my computer. It showed up on the iPad pixelated like when tv censors nudity, pointer tracking seemed pretty fluid even with that playing.

What would be nice is a direct connection between the iPad and computer instead of wifi. My work network is a hassle to log into so I don't event do it most of the time. If I need to look up something on the iPad, i pull out my cell phone hotspot.

They claim sub 1ms response times when connect d directly via USB.

Pixelation is expected and by design. We are optimized for displaying high quality still images.

If a large change occurs on your Mac screen and we are unable to keep up, we show pixelated content. This is a signal that we don't have the full screen in yet, and that the screen image is loading. Astropad is honest, when the image is clear, you are assured what you see is the actual content, artifact free.

Sending high image quality over WiFi is really challenging. Ever wonder why we don't have wireless TVs? or Wireless computer displays? It's really really hard to do.

Well... we do have wireless TVs. They started that way.

http://www.whdi.org/

I'm not sure what sense you mean "don't have" or "wireless". So first of all, props to ghostly_s, because in the '30's when serious TV experimentation started a lot of the tests were radio-wave based.

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