XPPen Artist Pro 16 (Gen 2) Drawing Tablet with 2.5K QHD Full-laminated Screen, 99% sRGB Color Gamut, 16K Pen Pressure, 16" Graphics Pen Display with Built-in Stand, Supports Windows, macOS, Android

I've been using my Artist 16 Pro for a month now and it's been a joy to use. It's been a hassle free well functioning device during this time.I'll cover the main functional items in this review, and finish with several technical pictures that analyse the device in ways you wont see elsewhere.Screen:XP-Pen describe the screen as "fully laminated". In the world of drawing tablets this means the outer glass, the sensor layer and the LCD panel are all physically bonded leaving no space between them. This prevents the pen from "hovering" over the drawing that would leave a visible gap between the nib and the display. It makes lining up pen strokes for precise technical drawing that much easier.The drawing tablet as you've seen is very thin, which I was a bit worried about at first. But after a month of using it on my knee, and swapping it back to the desk many times, I've discovered that the high build quality and strengthened all metal back make the tablet very sturdy. Regarding the excellent build quality - check my comments about the USB plug, and pen later on too.The tablet can be used with the controls on the left or right - as the USB-C plug can connect either way around to prevent tangling, and Windows can flip the display for you. One downside I found was if the USB-C plug cable is pointing towards the middle of the tablet, the cable covers the power button! I have to push it out of the way to get my finger to it. It's not a big issue, but a grumble I wanted to share.There's three control buttons down the sides.One is the power button - hold it to turn the tablet on/off. A nice touch with the power button when the device is turned off is that it still "exists" to Windows. This prevents Windows from jumping all your windows to the main display, leaving your drawing program set up properly without having to close it too.The other two buttons are for controlling the brightness. The tablet is very bright so I've used it mostly on a low 20/100 brightness. At 100/100 I imagine it would work well with direct sun shining into your work room. The on-screen-display shows the current brightness you've set for a second or two after you've pressed the brightness buttons.The tablet comes with a pre-applied matt screen protector that doesn't have a single bubble. I'm glad - I make lots of bubbles putting protectors on my phone, and doing the same on a much larger tablet would be impossible for me!The back of the tablet is a textured metal black surface. It hasn't slipped off my knee when I've been sketching on my couch. But it doesn't have rubber feet, so if you want to use the tablet on a glass desk you will want to buy some rubber feet, or better yet - rubber strips. There's also a stand available.The control wheel on the front is solid metal and rotates smoothly without wiggling. There's also another "wheel" inside this one built into the plastic centre piece. It's touch sensitive and doesn't physically rotate which is a bit odd to get used to. I imagine it's easier if you've used an iPod.Something that's been missing on every tablet I've had is a recess to slide in a "legend" to see what my buttons do, sadly this tablet is no different. If like me you confuse your buttons, we'll have to buy some masking tape and write them on.The USB C plug is recessed. A big part of the plastic plug gets inserted into the tablet which prevents the thin metal USB-C connector from getting bent off. While this is great, a small grumble I have I mentioned before - the cable covers the power button if the plugs plugged in towards the centre of the tablet and you have to move the cable a centimetre out of the way to reach it. It's not a deal bracker at all though. I mention it for completeness.X3 Powered stylus:The stylus, just like the tablet is very well made. It's chunky and long for a good grip. The two buttons on the side stand proud of the pen body - so they can be pressed by feel. You'll find some tablets they're flush which causes them to slip away from under the fingers.Note though - the tablet is pen input only - NOT finger touchable. You can't do finger painting!I've tested it with my tablet testing software - it's very accurate in the X and Y directions, and it has very accurate pressure sensitivity requiring the lightest feather touch to the tablet to initiate drawing. The pen's tilt is good, it has about 5 degrees of travel which is good for this price range.The pen updates at 200 times a second. Which is just 5 milliseconds between position updates to the PC! A standard mouse is usually around 100 to 130 times a second, so you'll find even your fastest strokes will be captured accurately.The pen has no consumables apart from very cheap P06 nibs. It doesn't need a battery, nor does it need any springs replacing. The nibs can be bought on Amazon and are the same design as the Artist 12's... you can get 50 for ten pounds. I've not needed to replace my first one yet, and the case has a further 9!The eraser is good. It has a better pressure sensitivity and accuracy than older model tablets. Though many artists prefer to map a button on the screen or on the pen to use the high precision nib for better erasing control. Still, having an eraser end is a nice addition.The pen comes in a premium textured metal black "click to open/close" case, with nine spare nibs (and one in the pen). There's a little metal disc with a hole in it built into the inside of the case to pull out old nibs.Cable/Power:The supplied cable is long enough to have my laptop on the floor, and the tablet on my knee with cable left over so I can sketch on the couch!It has two USB-A male connectors. The black one is for power and to send the PC the pen position, while the red one is extra power if needed.I've checked the power consumption of the tablet and it consumes 5 volts, at 0.55 amps (2.75 Watts) - about 1/3 of a USB hard disks power, or similar to external USB "Solid state disk" storage power requirements. So unless you have an under powered USB plug, you'll be fine just using the one.On the other hand, you've got choice if your USB socket is underpowered - you can use an adjacent USB plug on your computer for the red power plug, or if you don't have a spare, you can use the supplied power adapter. At 2 amps the adapter is highly over-speced for its intended use. This is good, as it means it runs cold, runs efficiently, and will last you the life of your equipment.Windows software drivers (the software that lets Windows know the pen is connected):It's easy to setup..... I just visited the XP-Pen website, downloaded them from the clearly marked page, and after the install my PC didn't need to restart, though it's recommended.This past month the drivers have been stable, and haven't crash.The drivers support Microsoft's "Windows Ink" feature - so if you're running it on a laptop, closing the screen lets the laptop be used as a tablet, with the screen keyboard popping up to type when you touch a text box! It's kinda fun, though not as fast as the real keyboard. But if you're working on your lap with the laptop on the floor, the on screen keyboard is a way of naming your files without having to pick up your laptop each time.The drivers and tablet work on all the software I've tested it on - Krita 5, Photoshop CC 2021, Art Rage 6, and openCanvas. The last two are available for free download after buying the tablet!A nice feature of the driver is that it's universal - if you've kept it up-to-date then support for the Artist 16 pro is already built in as all the driver links on the website download the same driver despite being linked from different model pages. This might change in the future, but knowing it saved me time downloading what is the same driver again. You can confirm it works by opening the system-tray icon for the tablet (coloured triangles). The currently plugged in tablet model shows on the driver's title screen at the top left.Technical support:Email support is very fast (usually 1 business day) with a competent staff that can help without forwarding you all over the company.My thoughts:It's seldom that I'm as happy with a new device as I am with my Artist 16 pro. It's stylish, well made, and becomes "invisible". When I'm drawing I forget I'm using the tablet. This is the sign of a great tool - one that gets out of the way of the task, and becomes an extension of yourself.The improvements XP-Pen have made to the stylus - increased polling speed, new tilt sensor and more sensitive nib are all welcome improvements over older models.The lamination works well - it looks like the display is touching the pen nib without the big gap non-laminated screens have. (It cuts out the parallax effect)It's easy to move between the computer and laptop too - as simple as plugging in a screen.Technical Images:Red/Green/Blue Spectroscope chart: This shows the frequency(colour) of light as if it's been split through a prism. The wide colour gamut can clearly be seen by the deeper blue used (from the old 453nm to a deeper 435nm), a wider overall gamut used for the green (from 536nm centre, to a new 520nm), and a deeper red from previous screen versions. From the old 609nm, now a deeper 624nm. Together these changes produce deeper blues, and punchier cherry reds. The higher colour gamut is real!Black table scan image: This has grey lines marked on the image. The pen and a ruler are used to draw lines between the white dots. This shows clearly any deviation away from straight. As you can see this has a quality linear sensing system.Thermal image (FLIR): This black/orange/yellow image shows my tablet on the left, and my laptop on the right after an hours use. The "hottest" area is the exhaust vent on my laptop at a cool to the touch 32.7 degrees. As you can see - the tablet drawing surface is ice cold. It's entirely black - a cool 24 degrees! The only area that's not ice cold (but still cold) is just under the buttons, where the USB-C cable plugs in. This is no doubt where the tablets "brain" is and is expected. The slight warm bar along the base of the tablet (running along the side of the laptop in the image) is where the LED drivers are for the displays lights. Overall this is an incredibly cold running device, as demonstrated by this thermal image, and the tablet having no need for active/fan cooling.Power usage gadget: This plugs in to the USB connector and reads out the displays power usage. Here you can see it's 5 volts at 0.55 amps(2.75 Watts) - about 1/3 of a USB hard disks power, or similar to external USB "Solid state disk" storage power requirements. So unless you have an under powered USB plug, you'll be fine just using the one.

Great product! make sure your USB-C is linked to the GPU otherwise get a USB-C to HDMI + 2 USB cable from their website directly (about £15)If your USB-C is linked to the GPU (all laptops do, but older PC don't) then all you need is the USB-C connector, no pover cable which is great.This size is pretty big, anything bigger like the 20 inch you would struggle to use it efficiently

My first impressions of the XPpen drawing display are generally very positive. However, I am disappointed that the product specification does not make clear that the computer must have a “USB-C port that supports graphics output (DisplayPortTM Alternate mode)”. The sentence in quotes is in the small print in the “Quick Guide’ that came with the display. This might be obvious to techies, but it wasn’t to me. The USB-C to USB-C cable provided did not work with the USB-C port on my PC. XPpen does offer an alternative (to be purchased separately) – XPPen AC97 3-in-1 USB Cable, but this did not work on my PC either. I have subsequently discovered that the drawing display works fine connected (via the USB-C to USB-C cable) to a laptop with a Thunderbolt4TM USB-C port.

Did not work on my Mac Studio. Tried all the drivers but to no avail. It worked as expected with Windows 11 but the software drivers for the Mac are so frustrating and hit and miss. I returned the XPPEN 15.6 pro which did the same thinking it may be too old to work with new tech but sadly not. The new Pro 16 gen 2 was just as bad. The tech support were absolutely awful and no matter how many times I emailed to tell them I had already uninstalled restarted and re installed the only advice they gave was to uninstall and reinstall. There is no phone support for UK just the main customer support email address in Shenzhen in China. You may be lucky but it was a frustrating and slow process for me which still isn’t resolved. In the end I bought the Wacom Cintiq. Flawless installation and amazing tablet that’s very well made.

The product came with reasonable protective delivery packaging. I had visions of cracked screens as i monitored the delivery vans arrival. I worried unnecessarily....The tablet comes in very attractive box with all the relevant cables to connect to my laptop. Once plugged in you follow the simple set up instructions to download the drivers and your good to go.The screen works well, albeit i would prefer more brightness than it provides at maximum, but that's just me. The screen does provide a pleasant experience creating and viewing your work. i find the pen very comfortable to use and was able to manage the pressure sensitivity of the pen quite well.i have never used a tablet for drawing, however i downloaded KRITA and it's been a match in heaven and i've managed to create some reasonable portraits and even a few simple cartoons.I've given five stars as it definitely worth the price, a solid piece of kit well constructed.

Well engineered product - I have been using this tablet / pen to edit many digital images over the past few months and the functionality is simply brilliant. Very pleased and highly recommended. 👍

The display is no way as bright as you'd expect and does make it difficult when you're editing images in photoshop. The images of the tablet show the unit having a stand to support it at an angle but this is neither included or built in, which does mean you will need order one (false advertising).

My favourite part about this is that, provided you have the right USB-C connector on your computer (one that provides image and power - my MacBook has this) it only needs ONE cable. No more messy cables lying all over the place, just the one! That was something that really bugged me about my old Wacom :)Aside from that, it works great with my MacBook Pro. I had to download the correct drivers and software from the XPPEN website to get it all working and calibrated, but after that it’s been perfect!