SISO Tablo Turns Your Laptop Into A Powerful Tablet PC Review

True.
Some laptops and monitors aren’t made to be touched. But according to my review you can actually write in the air so there is no need to touch your screen saving it from any scratches. When I use it I don’t actually apply any pressure to my screen. Many times I don’t ever touch my screen. When I use the pen as a mouse I hold the pen about 2″-3″ inches (and even times further away) from my screen.
Fortunately, the felt tip on the Tablo is soft enough that I don’t have any marks on my laptop. That’s the beauty of this stylus pen unlike other tablet pens: no heavy contact or any contact has to be made to the screen.
Unless I spill my coffee on my laptop screen any time soon I hope I should still be able to read it in the next six months. 🙂

The MacBook screen has a protective glass, too bad this device is not OS X compatible.

Fred
I checked the Hantech website. Still no support for MacBooks. I read somewhere that there was going to be some support for a MacBook but nothing as of yet.

dealextreme has a smiler piece of tech for sale. it’s simply a glass usb touch screen but you have to do some hacking to install it.

Tablo ruined my life!!!!!!!!!

Sorry, I just have one other thing to add. How long did the battery last with regular usage? Thanks again.

I bought a Tablo and I can say with confidence that it is a pretty nice tool to have if you are an artist. It works absolutely great with Photoshop, Artrage, OpenCanvas, The Gimp, Painter, Manga Studio, and especially well with the vector-based program Xara Designer Pro (all of which I tested). In fact, for the price I highly recommend it.

I have a Wacom Pen and Touch, which I found useless due to the disjointed effect of not being able to draw directly onscreen. I bought the Tablo, and after setting it up properly and testing it thoroughly, I gave the Wacom tablet to my brother and now only need the Tablo. The only thing better would be a Wacom Cintiq, but I don’t yet have the $2000 US to get the high end Cintiq I want.

Unkike what was reported here in the review, the Tablo does not have pressure sensitivity, but it is supposed to have maybe some kind of velocity sensitivity, Which I notice in some of the raster-based programs. The tip is simply an on/off switch – like a mouse button. So if you are looking for any degree of pressure levels with the Tablo, you won’t find it.

I wound up hooking up an external monitor to my laptop, took the stand off the monitor, and set it up on an extension arm so I could attach it to my desk, and move it around enough to draw comfortably. With the right monitor and an angled drawing desk, you could get a good enough drawing setup to be able to draw well and comfortably.

After one month I wore out two pen tips. I was a little distressed by this because the tips would run out relatively quickly and I had no replacement source. Then I noticed that the clear tube on a can of duster was about the same diameter as the pen tips. I checked it out and sure enough the tube fit into the Tablo very nicely.

I trimmed it down to the right length and left it slightly longer than the Tablo felt tips just because it felt better to have that extra length. I lightly sanded off the edges around the end that was to be the tip when I was done to get rid of any sharp edges.

Even though it was hollow it felt fine to draw with. It had the added bonus of being translucent, so I can kind of see through the tip and can visually locate my cursors better. I would continue to use clear tubing over the often-found red tubing that comes with some types of duster cans. The red might leave marks, though I am only guessing in this regard.

After one week, it shows no wear and tear, and glides smoother than the felt tips.

I clean the monitor on occasion with a small amount of armor-all on a clean soft cloth. Works great and further reduces friction. The monitor is holding up fine.

Most monitors have a protective plastic layer, and mine has a non-glare setup that seems to work beautifully. Pretty tough. Much better than the laptop screen, which is a Macbook running XP Pro through Bootcamp.

The cool thing about the Tablo mouse button setup is that if you are using the airbrush tool in whatever paint program you happen to like, it can function like a real airbrush – you can hold the Tablo pen 3 or 4 inches above the surface of the monitor (as mentioned in the site review), and use the forward mouse button like an airbrush spray trigger. Still no pressure sensitivity, but by changing the opacity and levels of the spray effect, you get a fairly convincing airbrush feel, and it looks cool when you are doing it too. A buddy of mine who has a Cintiq says he has to buy a separate pen for that.

My external monitor, btw, is a 22 inch widescreen. My Macbook can’t take advantage of it’s full resolution, but it is still one of the coolest overall digital art related experiences I have ever had for a fraction of the price I would have to pay otherwise through Wacom.

Anyone here could find a cheap monitor through Ebay or Wal-mart if they don’t want to risk whatever good monitor they are currently using. In Canada, at Wal-mart, I can get an appropriate sized monitor for about $80 to $100 CAN.

You don’t want to go much bigger than 22 inches in monitor size – my 30″ monitor caused nothing but problems with the Tablo. I couldn’t get it to recognize my smaller secondary monitor on my main computer in dual monitor mode. The setup and calibration software could not seem to figure out where my smaller second monitor was. If my smaller monitor was the primary, it might have worked, but I am fine with the more portable Macbook setup for now anyway.

The Tablo is less than $100 US. You probably already have a computer, and there is plenty of software out there you can use the Tablo with. I found Artrage to be the most fun. I found Xara to be the best from a vector graphic standpoint – it’s a far better value and more intuitive than Illustrator too. Open Canvas is an amazingly Photoshop-like replacement for Photoshop, with the bonus of having brush tools like Painter – it lacks a fair number of PS features though, sort of more like an older version of PS. Artrage, Open Office, Manga Studio Debut, are all under or about $80 US. The Gimp is free. Xara Designer Pro is I think about $299. Worth twice what they are charging easily given that it does web pages, Desktop Publishing, simple 3D, and can draw as good as Illustrator or better without the complexity.

I installed a tablet emulator add-on in Firefox and now I can use my browser as if it were on an iPad or iPhone. You can try this by searching for the term TABLET in the Search For Add-ons part of Firefox if you want to try this. It makes scrolling a breeze.

Be sure to set up the Tablo sensor bar according to the instructions, or you will see weirdness. On the monitor I am using, I haven’t set the recommended 1/4″ buffer vertically from the monitor frame to the bottom of the sensor bar, so I get a bit of weird movement near the upper corners of the screen. I didn’t set it because the monitor frame is thicker than a laptop frame, so the Tablo sensor bar can’t attach the way it would normally on a laptop monitor. I just haven’t found anything yet that I think would do the job and look nice. So I have the bar held in place with repositionable 2-sided tape, which works well. I extended the bar out about 1/4 inch forward and this seems to be working the best overall.

When the batteries start to wear, you may notice that your cursor will start to drift around a bit even though you are holding the pen still. You can still draw very effectively even though this is happening.

The batteries have lasted me much longer than I expected. Couldn’t give you an exact timeframe for that, but they go for a long time. Turns out the local dollar store sells the exact type, 5 in a pack for $1.25, so batteries are cheap (for me anyway). The Tablo requires 3 of these batteries at a time.

An unexpected bonus – the Tablo has me sketching by hand again, experimenting with painting techniques, and getting ready to produce art for a children’s storybook and a comic or two. I would never have done any of this without it – too expensive to experiment with oil paints, watercolors, airbrushing, pastels. etc, in the real world, and the cleanup is simply more than I am willing to deal with on my busy schedule.

One word of caution – Do not remove the removable tip cage unless you have to, and do not touch anything within the cage if you do. There are some very delicate nubs (for lack of a better description) and they break off easily if rubbed or squeezed too hard. I bought my brother a Tablo and he rendered it useless by doing this very thing. Now he has to settle with my Wacom Pen and Touch. 🙁 I get a spare sensor bar out of the deal I guess.

Oh, the alignment is never really perfect. There seems to be a sort of sweet spot that is the better portion of the middle of the monitor – this represents the same area pretty much that my buddy’s lower-end Cintiq has though. I have found it all to be acceptable, once again given the price.

And, no, I have not been paid to write this – I just like it when I am looking for a product and someone who has used it gives up an in-depth review so I can buy with some knowledge of what I am getting into. I found the review here good, but a little light. Thought I could help out a little.

Hope this helps everyone.

I actually did end up buying the SISO Tablo a while back and I can say with genuine honesty taht it was horrible. I purchased it with the intention to use it as an art producing tool but it failed. It can only be used effectively by drawing EXACTLY perpendicular to the screen otherwise the pen will not line up with the cursor. It also has random moments when the cursor doesn’t line up with the pen.

The pen jams constantly. I would be drawing and all of sudden the pen tip would jam in the pen and cause it to be on a permanent “right click” until you physically take the tip and seperate it from the pen. Then you had to undo the process and it was a very tedious, inefficent, painful process.

The tablo also has absolutely NO pressure sensitivity. You could not possibly produce quality work without pressure sensitivity because you will never be able to adjust the thickness and value, etc. of a line whilst working. You must meticulously go back and clean up it’s mistakes and it still looks horrible. I must have re-calibrated the pen a dozen times.

To conclude as a presentation device it is fantastic. You can circle things, write notes, highlight key parts of your presentation but as an art tool it fails to produce anything. Don’t torture yourself and try to train yourself to work with this tool, your hard work will be in vain as the skills you will obtain from this device are not transferrable to any other device in the digital art industry and your work will always look poor quality regardless of your skill or hours of time spent in trying to use this horrible device.

I returned it and got a bamboo pen and touch and I couldn’t have been happier. It is incredibly accurate (2540 lpi) and fantastic pressure sensitivity (1024 levels). It creates fantastic work and any youtube ‘speed paint’ video will prove that. Wacom is the industry standard and the bamboo pen and touch will prove itself (by the way the small size of it is more than enough for me as I don’t have to move my hand too much and I work small anyway). Thanks for reading and good luck buying.

PS: 600 DPI for art is a joke. Of course it’s not enough, people argue the bamboo which has 2540 lpi is inaccurate and purchase the Intuos4 which has 5080 lpi. The bamboo pen and touch is more than enough and I think that the people complaining are just standing by their Intuos, the bamboo is more than enough.
PPS: If you can afford the better wacom model, get it! The more you pay the better it will be (Cintiq is the best!).

I may have misunderstood the question regarding the 600 DPI thing. My comment was pertaining to print resolution rather than the resolution of any particular graphic tablet specs.

I wasn’t trying to diminish the quality or excellence of Wacom products in my own review, simply my own preference and experience.

I would love a Wacom Cintiq because it is the ultimate experience in tablet use to my knowledge – I intend to get one eventually, but for a fraction of the price the Tablo is worth exploring and is closer to the actual feel of a Cintiq than the Wacom Bamboo line, other than pressure sensitivity and accuracy.

Drawing directly on the screen is still easier, more satisfying. Not to say that you can’t get used to drawing offscreen on a tablet, as many Youtube videos and tutorials have proven.

The Tablo does not rely on tablet resolution because it doesn’t use one – your monitor resolution is what it uses and will conform to whatever DPI your final artwork will have in whatever software you are using – just like a mouse might.

I have created some very nice drawings with it, but I have spent a fair amount of time with it, and it has become pretty stable. As I mentioned, there is some drift, and the point about the tip sticking is valid – I meant to mention it but forgot. Since replacing the felt tip with the plastic one, I have that happening quite a bit less. Usually what it means is that the tip was not inserted properly to begin with.

I am sorry to hear that some others have had bad experiences

No problem – I was just clarifying for the most part. All I can say otherwise is that I am producing art with it, quite nicely in fact. I do have to zoom in quite a bit for accuracy, and that is where the higher resolutions of the Wacom would come in handy for sure.

Pressure sensitivity can be worked around in several ways, but having that feature would certainly make the Tablo better.

Once again, sorry your Tablo experience was a bad one.

This is the biggest waste of $100 I have ever spent. It doesn’t match up to the cursor on the screen half the time. The ball point pen tips do not work. Hand writing isn’t legible. and the table mode doesn’t even match up to the screen. This device isn’t even worth $20. DO NOT BUY.