And ya, that matte drawing surface was another feature that sold me on it. It has a discernible texture to it when you draw on it which I really like.

Cost-wise, it’s awesome! Sadly, because I was an early adopter, I paid full price for mine, but I don’t care. I luvs its I tells ya!

A quick search has helped me discover the sad truth that the Bamboo does in fact NOT sport Intuos3 guts.

Y’know what I’m just gunna make a post on it.

1) REALLY glad I got the larger size. The usable area issue is strictly one of personal preference, but for me, the smaller one would have just felt to cramped on 2 24″ monitors. If anything I wish this thing was bigger…certainly wider, at least.

2) For a cost-for-performace factor, this thing can not be beat. It sells for $229 at Future Shop, and $186 at Canada Computers, and since FS price-matches and beats by 10% of the difference, mine cost $182. Not too shabby, considering my Intuos3 6×11 put me out $550 + shipping.

I’ve been playing with it all night, and there’s a bit of a learning curve involved, but the responsiveness issues are not horrible. I assume by sensitivity you mean the tablet mapping, as the pressure levels are identical to the Intuos 3 at 1024 levels, and twice that of the Intuos 2 and smaller Bamboos (which, IIRC, clock in at 512 levels.)

What I could really live without is the touch feature; I find more of a gimmick than anything else.It wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for my workspace setup, which, as I said, has my tablet below my keyboard, causing my palms and forearms to rest on the tablet when I’m typing. That said, the quick key feature to disable the touch feature is outstanding.

The surface is also much better than that of the Intuos 3; it has that matte feeling to it, making drawing on it feel more like pencil-and-paper, and eliminating the need to tape a sheet of paper to the device to get that real-world feeling.

Re. with the sensitivity factor, I gotta say, I don’t notice a huge discernable difference between the performance of the Bamboo and the Intuos 3. I DEFINITELY see a difference between the Bamboo and the Intuos 4, but it feels very much to me like the Bamboo Fun has Intuos 3 guts. Honestly, once I got the thing calibrated, I wouldn’t be able to tell the 2 apart, aside from looks.

Besides, I mainly bought it for the touch feature which I loooooooooooooovvvvvve!!!! Seriously, I have permanently removed my mouse from my system.

As a tablet it doesn;t hold a candle to the Intuos; not nearly as responsive or quick.

The pen is just terrible…what happened to the oh-so-beautiful Intuos design I love so very much? :sad5:

My biggest peeve so far is strictly a personal one…I keep my tablet south of my keyboard, and as I feared, my forearms resting on the table cause the pointer to travel all over the place. Very irksome.

If these growing pains persist, I’ll be returning this thing within the 30 days.

I’m thinking of bringing mine in on Sunday for the podcast to do a brief overview. You can try it out if you want to see how it is.

If I pick one up, it’ll probably be the smaller version. In natural media, I’m used to inking on smaller spaces, so even the medium tablet feels unnaturally large to work on (like when I did the Hypothesis artwork, the tablet was too big).

As far as L4D goes, I’m not really sure it’ll be really that bad. Just think about it, on the touch surface, you control mouse movement by gliding one finger in the direction you want to either go or look. A one-finger tap gives you the left mouse button which usually is firing your weapon and a two-finger tap will give you the right mouse button, which I can’t remember what it usually controls in FPS games. Hmmmm, that sounds pretty good there.