My employer has always sworn by his Wacom tablet and tried to get me to use it at the same time he was showing me around Media100.

To me, clutching a stylus all day kept reminding me of the Get Smart episode with "The Craw". 'Cause that's what my hand felt like. Really painful for me, a complete joy for him.

One thing he said he liked was that the tablet was absolute. The top right corner of the tablet was the top right corner of his (single) screen. I should ask if that's still true now that he's using dual screens...

What else...? Like your mouse wheel? I'm not sure what wheel function you can get out of a stylus.

Like the fact that when you let go of your mouse it just lays there, ready to be grabbed again? Styluses, like pens, have to be put somewhere.

Let's see...At the time, he said that most of his M100 keyboard commands were mapped for easy left-hand keyboard access. So he could have his right hand holding a stylus to the tablet in his lap and his left hand on the keyboard.

Now, a tablet and a mouse can coexist. So you could use your mouse when you want, your Shuttle Express if you like that, and your tablet when that's the best tool. There's no rule that says you have to pick just one.

We had a few other stylus users here. I found that they frequently had drag-and-drop accidents with the stylus where they'd accidentally pick up some icon and drop it into a random folder, and then not know where it went because they weren't watching for that.

Rob Mack

I use a Wacom tablet all the time. I find a mouse much more tiring to use. Having said this I use CorelDraw a lot more than I use Vegas. I usually have the touch setting switched off. Since I hardly ever use the mouse I can't comment on what I miss by not having access to the scroll button.

Kit

Well I tried my daughters pad and it is kinda weird going from a mouse. Not bad though. The absolute location is hard to get use to you really have to adjust your movement, also not having a wheel it is hard for me to quickly zoom the timeline.

@mack350 the corner to corner absolute works on a 2 screen set up that is what I have.

I think I will keep playing with it, it is kind of nice to have the pad on my lap and being able to work.

Paul B

"That's Craw, not Craw". great show, great character.

I'm a huge fan of tablets, been using them for too many years to remember. I had a 6x9 Intuos 4 that was working perfectly, but... I bought a few cheapo tablets from my favorite cable store, monoprice, which I probably found from someone on this forum several years ago. They were ridiculously cheap, 2 for 34.99 on sale, so I bought 2 thinking they'd be a waste of money, but I wanted one for my laptop to take with me to work. Not quite as well built as my wacoms, (i have 5 wacoms) but somehow, the pressure sensitivity seemed better, tracking too. I used them for a while, put one on my hackintosh, worked great. I really struggled with the notion that these cheap tablets were actually better than my beloved wacoms. I finally swapped out the 6x9 on my main box with a big one from monoprice (for a whopping 49 dollars), never looked back, still have my wacom ($399.00) sitting on my shelf, I guess I'm waiting for the monoprice unit to die. I mean, it's got to, right? I have 4 of them at the moment. Love them. Also, guitar cables from monoprice are fantastic as well.

The one caveat about tablets in general, you MUST resign yourself to feeling slightly uncomfortable when you first use it, because you will. Create a photoshop file and make it full screen, pick a brush and just draw circles and squares and scribbles for 5 minutes. I've introduced them to lots of people and once it clicks, you're hooked.

I bought a WACOM bamboo about a year ago, and the challenge of using a pen without looking at it (and trying to track it on a monitor) was too much for me. It felt great to write on, but it was extremely unnatural because of the distance between the medium everything appears on and your hand making the motions.

I gave it 2 weeks and bought a tablet PC with WACOM digitizer, which is great for note taking and drawing, but I don't run Vegas on it.

DDM,
cost can be a big sticking point t trying a tablet and stylus, so yours is a good suggestion.

There are programs and there are situations where a stylus would be a good thing. I really resisted it for use with Media100 but they are attractive as a drawing tool.

They could be attractive with a laptop but not when the laptop is actually in your lap. I think the main point is that they don't necessarily replace other pointers.

Ergonomically, the best fit for me has been an MS Natural Wireless Mouse. It's about the size of a baseball and tilts my hand 45 degrees, but as mice go it has some function problems (some applications don't work well with the high resolution scroll wheel, Vegas only just fixed this in a recent build of 11.)

I have a first rev of the Wacom Graphire. Sometimes the driver loads in Win7, sometimes it doesn't. I almost never use it, especially since I don't have one at home, work, and in the laptop bag.

Rob

Rob, agree completely. I still use my microsoft mouse with the wheel in vegas extensively, indispensable, really, for zooming etc. I also use a contour Shuttle Pro 2 with my main desktop for vegas (indispensable, also). Might seem absurd when you think about it, but I use them all and somewhat at the same time, I do have to drop the pen occasionally, but it's easily picked up, and my editing workflow seems quite fluid to me, while I'm doing it. If I analyze it, well, then it seems quite haphazard. The price of the monoprice tablets, which is the only reason I bought the first 2, was so low that it was worth taking the risk. The pleasant surprise of how good they worked was more than just icing on the cake. The Windows 7 x64 wacom drivers was what really got me to unplug my wacom finally as it would just die, every few days, I would have to reinstall the driver and it would work perfectly again, I had a shortcut to the driver on my desktop and it wasn't that big a deal, but the monoprice tablet has not failed once. Knock on silicone.

Yes, I do!  I use a Medium Wacom Intuos 4.  My goal, other than for typing text, is to use the tablet exclusively.  Assigning just the right express keys to replace any shortcuts I use on the keyboard.  It works great.  For a quick edit, I will turn to the mouse, but as soon as I'm editing for any length of time I will jump to the tablet.  It's very precise for masking and I can't see any disadvantage over a mouse.

i've been using various wacom tablets for over 10 years now as i was getting rsi from a variety of mice (mouses?) and trackballs. i think it does take some getting used to, but once you're comfortable with it (and it does take time) there's no looking back...