Advice on buying a new USB graphics tablet?

I have used an aiptek tablet for some time, but it pretty much sucked, so I got myself a Wacom Bamboo. Really, Wacom is the only brand that is any good.
You can get the Wacom Bamboo for about 53€ right now

I was also going to suggest the Wacom Bamboo line of tablets. My students use them to great effect.

@ragingloli I’m using an Aiptek tablet at the moment and I genuinely find it better than my friend’s Wacom Bamboo tablet; which model did you use before?

The one I use is a 600U, and it’s not steered me wrong once… Though that could just be insanely good luck on my part. The 600U cost me £60 about 3 years ago, and Amazon’s cheapest Wacom is at £48 right now.

Wacom’s likely to have the best compatibility with the greatest range of programs, too; no fiddling with drivers and so on.

it was a 12000u, after a short time the plastic cover sheet became wavy and a hindrance, so I ripped it off. Then the actual surface became wavy, too, making it literally impossible to even draw a straight line. And even without these problems, you could not draw a fast curve, because it would draw countless sharp edges in the line. Then there is the fact that as soon you had more than 1 monitor, the tablet became unusable, because there was no way to tell the tablet driver to only use one screen. It scaled it up to all of the screens, meaning that when you draw a circle, you get an ellipse. The same with monitors that have a different aspect ratio than the tablet.

Here’s a nice one that is affordable and got some good reviews.

@HungryGuy
From one of the reviews: “It is jumpy at times, and the software provided gives you little to no customization: you cannot specify, for example, how much screen area the tablet should control, or which monitor in a dual monitor setup you want to work in: the tablet will automatically span your full system resolution, meaning the higher resolution your system (especially dual monitor systems) the sloppier the tablet performs.”
These are precisely the issues that made me ditch the Aiptek tablet for a Wacom.
You really need to read the negative reviews on this one.

@ragingloli – I know. But no product has a perfect review. Every product will have something someone will complain about. If the reviews are generally favorable, and it has 4 or 5 stars, that’s about as good as it gets.

@HungryGuy
The problem is that, as one reviewer pointed out, some of the 5star reviewers actually work for the company that makes the tablet (or rather, rebadge, as the tablet is actually an aiptek in disguise), and the rest don’t know anything. The negative reviews point out what is specifically wrong with it, and they are consistently the same, dealbreaking points.
And the worst part is, for the price that thing costs (which is actually reduced by half), you can get the vastly superior wacom bamboo tablet (which is not reduced).

@ragingloli – Yes, that’s a nice one, too. Now, I don’t know what the OP’s application is, but for drafting, this one is might be a tad too small. And the reviews have some negative comments on this one as well. Again, no product is 100% perfect.

@HungryGuy
A large drawing area is actually bad, because you tire yourself out with moving your hand across the surface so much, and the hand is a lot more accurate in a smaller area. Plus you can zoom in and out on your PC anyway, so a large area is completely useless and even counterproductive. My Aiptek was one of those huge behemoths, because I too thought at first that bigger is better. Trust me, it is not.

And the negative reviews for the wacom, of which there are only 2, are 1: about an issue with one specific program, Adobe Lightroom, and 2 about the drawing area, which that one reviewer thinks is a bit too small.

@ragingloli Ah, I never used more than a single monitor for my work; I’m sure that would’ve made me a little less keen on the Aiptek! Never experienced any jagged/sharp edges on curves though, could that have been application-specific?

I’ll agree that Wacom tablets are definitely the best, it’s just for the kind of tablet I want (i.e. one that’s bigger than an A5 card), they just cost too much money for me to consider them seriously.

I have to admit I’m seriously tempted by the Wacom Inkling though, if only for the novelty of being able to draw something.

Thanks all :) I think I have settled on the wacom bamboo. I hope they travel well as I lug my gear all over the place