So how bout that Wacom Inkling?

By now, everyone's heard about the Wacom Inkling, right?  It's this cool little device that consists of a pen and a little receiver that sits on the top of your page and records your drawings stroke for stroke.  Then you plug it into your computer and it gives you a digital file you can edit in Photoshop or Illustrator.


I thought it might be cool to take on trips since the whole thing takes up less space than my pen and pencil case, so I got one and started playing around with it before our upcoming family vacation.  I'd seen side-by-side comparisons of scans and Inkling files, so I wasn't expecting amazing accuracy.  But I was pleased when the initial test drawings I did with turned out pretty accurate.


Then I tried some larger drawings and had some...rather warped results.  Such as:

Scan vs Inkling: IT'S SCARING ME

But I know what the problem was now!  This should have occurred to me, but as my sketchbook pages are not completely flat (it's not a spiral bound), the receiver was getting confused.  Hence all the jagged and misplaced lines.  I'm guessing I'll have much better luck with using an actually flat sketchpad.

One more comment:  At first I liked that the pen was a ballpoint (I draw with those a lot) but after a few drawings it started to annoy me.  Like all ballpoints, it doesn't always make the line you need on the first try.  But it THINKS it did.  So while the line may be invisible on the page, it'll be there in the Inkling file. For inking pencil sketches this is particularly annoying since it's hard to tell if there are lines missing.  Not sure if there's a good solution for this besides using the software to eliminate the extra lines before exporting (allegedly it can do this, though I have yet to figure it out.)

But I'm taking it on my trip and I'm going to continue to play with it.  It is a very fun piece of technology and I'm not too dissuaded by the drawbacks.