An illustrator’s review of the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil

Written by

Jonathan Roberts, writing for Fantastic Maps:

I would have settled for the iPad Pro being a really nice sketching tool – but what I’ve discovered is that the iPad Pro, the Pencil, and Procreate, get me 95% to a final illustration, and quicker than I would get there on my desktop.

In many respects, this is better than working in Photoshop on my Mac. I never expected to say that. The last 5% is due to the pieces that Procreate doesn’t do, that Photoshop does – text, labels, some of the more advanced features. So that’s software, not hardware – and I expect the app store will get a lot more firepower very quickly once developers really get to grips with the Pro.

This is a serious piece of kit that will find a central place in an illustrators workflow – but it will not replace a desktop.

And:

My bugbears with styluses are:

  • lag
  • jittery pressure sensitivity, so that you can see the linewidth change as you press harder, rather than having a smooth response to pressure
  • offset between the line and the tip

Apple has created a stylus with none of these problems, which places it squarely at the top of my list. This is as good as my Intuous in terms of responsiveness – and better than the Wacom Cintiq I tried. I’ve been told that you can calibrate the Cintiq to get past those issues, but here I don’t have to calibrate anything. It just works. I can’t find published specs on levels of pressure sensitivity of the Apple Pencil – but given the smoothness of the response I’d bet money on at least 1028.

The lack of lag is a minor miracle. Previous styluses using bluetooth connections have been plagued with visible lag between large sweeping line movements, and the screen response. Here Apple has weighted the deck in their own favour. When it’s taking data from the Pencil, the iPad samples at 240 times a second. This is compared to 60 times a second for finger input on previous iPads. The result is a seamless drawing experience.

This is a great review, shoots straight, pros and cons (the biggest con being price), well worth reading.