Cheap Cintiq - Yiynova MSP19
http://www.excaliberpc.com/597179/yiynova-msp19-19-tablet-lcd.html#TabSpecification
This seems like a pretty good deal. Anyone had any expirience with these, or actually own one? Can't find any videos of it on youtube and that's what concerns me. I want to know if it has wandering or accuracy problems before I buy it.
This seems like a pretty good deal. Anyone had any expirience with these, or actually own one? Can't find any videos of it on youtube and that's what concerns me. I want to know if it has wandering or accuracy problems before I buy it.
Replies
why? They usually take like a year to use up, the only problem i see from having the battery is heavy/unbalanced pen.
I tried many times, a few people I know got their stuff by luck. 99% they will get and charge 60%
Good thing I live in US now. Still missing Brazil tho.
http://www.excaliberpc.com/597179/yiynova-msp19-19-tablet-lcd.html
Let's try to keep the Q&A in the thread rather than emails so that all can benefit and your answers and you don't have to answer any given question more than once.
I've got some questions:
1. Does the surface heat up to an uncomfortable level after using it for any given period of time?
2. Is there any lag when drawing strokes? (In Photoshop or any other apps you may be using)
3. Is the pen tip to pixel placement accurate?
4. Is the there a nice pressure curve? (as in can you start with very little opacity then smoothly transition to opaque all in one stroke).
5. How long does the battery last?
6. Is the drawing surface very scratch resistant?
7. What about viewing angles and color accuracy? Do colors or contrast shift if you look at the screen from different angles?
8. How comfortable is the pen? (in comparison to a wacom pen if possible)
9. Is the device very sturdy or does it feel cheaply made?
We use it to trace detailed color variations on our drawings and photos, in order to make multi-leveled stencils on our laser cutter. Some of our stuff is detailed, but perhaps not to the point of some other applications. Sorry I cannot answer better, but I've only had it a few days, and my boyfriend keeps hogging it. LOL!! It works for what we needed it for, and we were glad to save the cash. The Wacom would have killed our budget... and we can always get one later. For now, this is fine.
I promise I'll come back in a week or two and expand on my answers and let you know of any problems. So far I love it, but again, I'm not a serious graphic designer with years of experience working on a Wacom.
It is super late, can't edit, I apologize for any errors above.
One thing I forgot to ask, is the screen glossy or matte?
I've got a old tablet PC (Toshiba m205) and the wacom pen (well Toshiba pen) feels pretty cheap too, but it still works after more than few years of moderate use.
i mean, it's only £350 converted to english moneyz, which is REALLY cheap. cintiq's here are retardedly over priced.
The display itself is really nice btw.
Also use lazynezumi with radius set to 0(or not, depending on how much you want your strokes smoothed.
My advice is...dont buy the Yiynova. Its not worth it. For starters the screen is horrible for art. Highly pixelated, lots of dead pixels..you can tell they use the cheapest panel they can find in china.
You will not be able to get the same quality as you would in a wacom product. The mouse can be jittery and you MUST not have any wacom drivers installed. That means if you use an intuos as well, you must give it up and uninstall the drivers or else the yinova wont play nice. It didnt always like zbrush or other pen based applications, it gets along ok with photoshop.
The pen is another issue...i can be ok with a battery powered pen, but whats not ok is the fact it uses a very springy plastic tip. This means when you press down no matter what you will have that soft fall off at the end. Bad for detail work. The pen also feels like it can break with little to no effort.
The only good thing about the yiynova is that the chinese people selling it are generally very nice and will accept returns...which im sure they get a lot of.
If you are serious about your art, avoid a yiynova. I wasnt expecting a perfect cintiq replica, but I was expecting something worth the value and did not get it. It was returned back and the lesson learned is stick with wacom for now.
My advice is if you want to save money, get a used cintiq new or old. Here in LA i have seen 21 inch cintiqs going for as low as $300 to $1000. You can get even cheaper if you look for the old cintiq models like the hitachi starboard. Also a lot of tablets pcs and older tablet notebooks have wacoms build into them. Check ebay.
Theres a decent chinese alternative (Hanvon Sentip) if you need to go chinese and cheap, their tech is probably the closest you will get to wacom's.
Note: Below are a set of alternatives, many you can find used for much cheaper. All have wacom digitizers build into them and they are recommended over any chinese knockoff as this point in time. If you can find a cintiq then go for it. I bought my barely used 20 inch wide screen version for $1000 off someone that couldnt get into digital art, and just left it in the box after a few tries. There are lots of people like this.
The below use versions of wacom digitizers that are often usable with a multitude of cheaper wacom pens, not tied to any one cintiq line up.
Also if you need a cheap tablet (no screen), the best wacom alternative is probably Monoprice:
hitachi starboard:
Older cintiq models:
Cintiq 17sx
Wacom equipped tablet/laptops:
Samsung Slate
Fujitsu Life book:
Modbook:
Asus eee slate:
Lenovo Thinkpad:
Well, its still early, but I've tried it out with zbrush and it seems to play nice with zbrush. One thing ive found with the yiynova is that it works better with detail stuff if you turn down the res of the display. It gives better lines for some reason when you do that.
Overall, I really wanted something that i could draw directly on, because i think better when i can do that, and its much faster. It has some negatives, but they can be worked around. If your are willing to sacrifice a bit of the polish that comes from using a wacom tablet for the ability to work on screen, i think you will be ok with the yiynova. for 500, i think its worth the purchase.
I will try out wacom drivers here on my rig(windows 7 64 bit) to see if it gives me any problems.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=iJjeevlM3Ak
Nope, it was used entirely with windows. The driver support is fairly bad. The resolution is already low, if you lower it more with an already pixelated screen...its not going to look right. Why would you buy a cintiq clone that you have to down rez to add detail... that is not rational.
The yiynova is not a very good cintiq alternative. Since I own a cintiq and intuos tablets, I can compare it to what it should be able to accomplish. The design of the yiynova is inherently flawed. By the way the yiynova isnt the only brand making use of the cheap chinese model, there are others like Bostco. I did some extensive research on where the hardware originates, including the digitizer brand, as well as those reselling it. Its just not something I would recommend, even for the price. You will be hard pressed to make something good with a yiynova compared to a wacom based digitizer and pen.
Sometimes when you buy a questionable product, especially from a foreign source...you kind of convince yourself that its greater than it really is...because the alternative is accepting the fact you just wasted a lot of money.
It is for this reason I posted a list of smarter alternatives if you cant spend the money on a new cintiq. Lots of products have wacom digitizers in them if you know where to look, and a lot of the older cintiqs can be found for LESS than the yiynova. The 17SX which can be seen here is a far better alternative to the yiynova, it cost half of what the yiynova goes for and uses wacom technology.
At the end of the day, the yiynova isnt really as good of a deal as some are lead to believe. You have look at the entire set of options to get a good idea of the value. Again I also saw people/businesses selling first generation 21 inch cintiqs for around $300-$700, and thats the best choice.
The newest 22inch cintiq goes for $1999, so the old models will go down in price as well. Remember there is the 20 inch wide screen and the 21ux first generation cintiq, after that came the second generation 21ux, and now the 22inch hd. This should cause the first generation 20 & 21inchers to go down in price even more so than before. The 20 inch was discontinued awhile back because they ran out of panels for it, so its also a good find. If you look in the right places you can get the right tools without blowing $2000.
I have actually talked with him over the net. He doesnt use the yiynova either, it just kind of sits there next to his cintiq and he instead works now on a monoprice tablet. At least thats the way he made it sound.
I think after the effect of getting a new screen (a bit a bad one) wears off, its just put on the way side for the tool that does it best. His artwork is also very specific in its art style, which can play out entirely what he looks for in a tablet.
Here is his website btw, his blog includes his impressions on tablets: http://frenden.com/
The Yiynova was a bit misleading. The cursor jitter was either less pronounced, or just less noticeable, on the smaller model. When I upgraded to the 19", it got pretty bad.
I was working with a fella named Udo Killerman on opensource drivers based on the Linux Wacom Tablet Project for the Yiynova and other Waltop based tablets for OSX. I made a lot of feature suggestions and did testing and Udo was eager to have someone to work with him. Nice fella, Udo.
I sold my Yiynova, however. I sold my Cintiq too. I gave away my Intuos. The Monoprice is amazing. It uses a Uc Logic based digitizer. Less lag in OSX than my Wacom hardware had.
The only caveat, some apps won't enable tablet specific features such as pressure sensitivity unless they see a Wacom driver present and running on the system. This goes for both Win7x64 and OSX Lion/Mountain Lion in my experience.
So, my advice, install Wacom's Intuos 3 drivers alongside the UC Logic/Monoprice ones. They're more lightweight than the Bamboo drivers and tell the apps which are so tied to Wacom's hardware that there's a tablet on the system.
Do that, and the Monoprice has a lighter touch in the low end of the pressure curve and less lag, to my touch, and outperforms Wacom equivalents.
Hotkeys feel a little flimsy, but battery life is great on the pen. And then pen doesn't feel much different than a Wacom styli in terms of weight or what have you.
I bought a few of 'em. You'd have to pry them from my cold, dead hands.
I say that because after Udo implemented cubic interpolation and line correction to the Yiynova drivers for OSX, jitter was significantly reduced. I think it just doesn't update quick enough to offer a clean line without software assistance at the driver level.
The more correction you add, the laggier the drawing. At one point, with correction values tweaked a lot at the driver level, the Yiynova felt like my Cintiq. That is, smooth, but laggy.
For the money, I'm not super impressed with any of Wacom's tablet monitors. Parallax and lag and $2-3K do not mix well in my book.
That's why I ultimately stuck with the Monoprice. It's zippy and cheap and accurate. I do not miss my Cintiq.
I get where you're coming from, but I work in a lot of styles that don't hit my portfolio. Specialization is pretty important for commercial success as a freelance illustrator because it's easy for art directors to understand, but I make a lot of painterly, pixel, and even some 3D art. Lineart is, however, a good denoter of stability and accuracy in a tablet because it's so delicate and demanding.
I make comic-y things for clients, painterly and pixel art for myself. I just started sculpting. The Monoprice, Yiynova, Cintiq, and Intuos were all tested in a variety of art styles, including those of all the work of mine below.
Heya Ray, good to see you are here as well. Yeah i wasnt trying to imply you only did one style of art, sorry if it came across that way. Mostly I was trying to put forth the idea that an art style you (or anyone else) which one may specialize in or put a lot of effort into would and or could play a role in which tool works best for that purpose.
Love the pixel art btw!
Monoprice only has regular tablets. Screens are not a necessity btw, I find that some of my work is better when using an intuos as opposed to my cintiq. Screen based is good but not necessarily better than a normal tablet.
I agree totally. I used a Cintiq for a few years and found I was better/faster with a regular old tablet after going back to the Monoprice. I guess all those years of practice as I saved money for a Cintiq on an Intuos translated into a heap of stored muscle memory on using regular tablets, hah!
The lag is more noticeable on tablet monitors, too. When your cursor trails behind your stylus/hand it's easy to see.
Monoprice tablets use UC-Logic digitizers. UC-Logic does sell a tablet monitor according to their site, but it has a lower report/poll rate than their regular tablets, so I haven't felt confident in taking the plunge.
Based on the look of P-Active's styluses, I suspect their monitor uses a UC-Logic digitizer too, but that's just speculation.
That means you're posting Ray's his own blog? hehehe, jk
Good questions. My only beef with using the alternatives is that you don't get that surface you get with Cintiqs. If I ain't wrong I believe the Cintiqs' surfaces have some grip, which helps in making fine lines if you're also a 2D artist/animator. The screens on Tablets are slick, which may be alright for 3D but no good for drawing and sketching.
first one: http://www.hwshuweiban.com/shuweibanchanpin/chuangyiyejiehuihua/2011/0923/92.html
looks pretty the same as the dp 10.1 from Yiynova to me O.o i'm indeed a bit confused now xD
second one: http://www.hwshuweiban.com/shuweibanchanpin/chuangyiyejiehuihua/2011/1011/148.html
seems the chinese guys got a cintiq 21 clone! later on the korean hanvon-site i found a "sentip 22" but with no picture - just a red text on black background. since i can't speak korean i only can guess that the text says something like "coming soon" but thats only my speculation...
but everywhere else i did not found anything about that new hanvon tablet-dispay.