This can mean less arm fatigue, but when you’re working on large (or multiple) displays, you may need to zoom in to work with fine details or map the active area to a portion of the screen.

Tablet size: The smaller the active area, the less your hand must move to manipulate the cursor on the screen.

As Victoria Ying advised, “ 100 dollars is reasonable you can upgrade as you move forward with your artwork.”

We focused on the sub-$100 range because extras such as multitouch and pen tilt recognition don’t make a huge difference in what you can create with a drawing tablet.

Price: Graphics tablets aimed at beginners cost less than $100, while bigger, professional-level tablets with more advanced features can cost three to five times that amount.

The best tablets work instantly, without any downloads or security hang-ups. In our experience, some of our options and their accompanying software took hours to start operating-we’re here to save you the headache. Drawing tablets in general are glitchy and hard to set up. “It’s super-important.” The driver affects how well the drawing tablet works with your computer, which software the tablet will work with, and the presence and severity of input lag.

Compatibility and stability: Although “no one will explicitly ask about the quality of the driver software, they should,” Jim Mortensen said.

However, many of our long-term Wirecutter testers have used their tablets for years, and they say an extra $20 was worth paying for double the pressure sensitivity over the course of their artistic development. We found that a minimum of 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity (pressure sensitivities scale upward in intervals of 512) is plenty. The higher the pressure sensitivity, the better you can control the line weight (how thick and opaque the lines are, based on how hard you press down on the tablet with the pen).

Pressure sensitivity: Many of our experts agreed that the most important feature of a drawing tablet is its pressure sensitivity.

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