Wacom is no stranger to computer designers and artists, and while Cintiq still maintains its high prestige and expertise, it is not as affordable for newcomers and hobbyists. Introducing the Wacom Bamboo Fun, providing practicality, function and fun within one affordable and efficient device.
The Bamboo Fun Pen and Touch from Wacom is a great pen tablet that offers designers a great new way to use their experience (or lack thereof) to draw and represent what’s on their mind, digitally. It is a sleek tablet, which features a pen track pad that, making it perfect for all of your designing needs. It is also more intuitive, as the trackpad is a complete touchpad, so you do not have to switch between the mouse and pen.
We personally tested out the Bamboo Fun from Wacom, which is definitely a clever and easy to use product. It is no doubt that designers and other technologically-focused folk could make a lot more with their Wacom tablets, but even for beginners, its ingeniousness is apparent. As soon as we took it out of the box, plugged it in and approved the proceeding installations, we were ready to draw.
At first you wonder what can be done, how to proceed, and whether you need a long set of instructions, but that passes after about one minute. We simply started using the tablet as if we have had it for weeks or months without any difficulties or immense learning curve.
The tablet itself may be touch capable, but it senses the pen’s stylus tip when pressed or hovered closely. This means you can rest your wrist on the tablet as you are moving and drawing and the pen itself acts as your drawing pen and mouse without any difficulties. As in the trackpad, it is comparable to your actual screen, so you do not need to scroll from left to right or drag your pen/mouse from top to bottom just to reach a specific icon, button or location. Simply put, what you see on the screen is available within the trackpad. If you need to reach your top toolbar, just bring your pen to the top of the trackpad, and hover it over the location you are specifically in need of. This is very helpful and intuitive, but after years of using our Notebook’s trackpad, it is actually the part that takes a bit getting used to.
In addition, the trackpad works for “flicks” and “gestures” as well. It may not be the Micorosoft Surface or so, but for the immediate and quick needs, it is more then efficient. Things such as enlarging an image can be done by touching the trackpad with two fingers and expanding. Moreover, you could rotate an image, flick left for a previous web page and there are additional movements you could use and customize. Furthermore, there are also 4 actual physical buttons on the trackpad which may be customized for your most relevant functions. Designers can surely find this valuable to switch and/or add more functionality within the trackpad without a need to get out of the groove.
The Bamboo Fun arrives with its own easy to use software applications, toolbars and widgets, but also works seamlessely with your Adobe apps such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and such and makes it easy to adapt and expand on your current experience.
Overall, the Bamboo Fun Pen and Touch is an amazing product for beginners as well as experienced users, though the Intuos4 would probably be better for extreme professionals. It is fun, affordable at a starting price of only $199 and arrives in one size (US) and two different sizes (Europe). For those who are looking to investigate some of their artistic talents on the computer screen, it is a great solution that is simple to adapt to and is definitely fun.
