My eternal quest to improve the way I work made me stumble across a new way of working out photos. While these devices have been around for a long time, I never had a chance to try them before. For many years I used a mouse for all my editing until I started using a tablet with a pen. Pen tablets are great but require some time to adapt to them, and they are usually smaller then your screen, so it requires some practice to get it right. I was always curious about tablets that were also screens, they usually struggle with image quality, and back in the day the latency of the pen was not great, things are surely changing.
Specs:
Dimensions – 443.27 x 256.45 x 9mm
Display Area – 344.16 x 193.59mm
Color Gamut – 92% Adobe® RGB, 88% NTSC, 125% sRGB
Display Resolution -1920 x 1080
Stylus – Battery-free
Pressure Sensitivity – 8192 levels
Color Depth – 16.7M
Contrast – 1200:1
Viewing Angle – 178°
Aspect Ratio – 16:9
Brightness – 250cd/m2
Compatibility – Windows® 10/8/7, Mac OS X® 10.10 (and higher)
What comes in the box?
As you can see in the photos above the box comes very well packed with the display, a stand, the pen case, power adapter for various countries the manuals and the glove.
Design
The design is nice and slick, and it is super-thin (9mm), you have all the 8 shortcut buttons on one side and also a virtual wheel. On the same side, you have the power button, brightness buttons and the USB-C power connector. The USB cable has one USB-C that will connect to the display, and it has two USB-A and an HDMI connector. They are all together so if you will lose or damage the cable you need another from XP-Pen. The two USB-A can be connected to the computer and have the computer power the display, or you can connect one to the computer and the other to the wall socket.
Now I would like to talk about the stand for a minute, the stand is made of plastic and its light, but I do wish the stand had more positions. There is only one position, while that position for me is actually not bad; I wish I could decide if I wanted a different position.
These displays are just as good as their screens and Pen’s, so let’s talk about the pen for a minute. The pen has a great feeling, and it is the best pen I have ever tried. The pen has two buttons, the case is quite bulky, and it brings a set of 8 replacement nibs. You can use the cap of the pen as a pen stand. I wish the pen was like my surface pen with a magnet to carry around with the display.
Software
The software is straightforward and intuitive to use; you can control all the shortcuts in there and also change the two function buttons on the pen. I left this as default for now, but slowly I will tweak it to my liking.
How do I use it
This kind of display is used a lot for drawing, and it has great capabilities. I have tried drawing on it but was too ashamed to show the results 🙂 I can’t draw.
I currently ran a three 27″ display setup plus the XP-Pen so I actually have four screens running at the same time, while that might be a bit overkill I love my setup. I’m mirroring one of my screens to the XP-Pen, the only reason I do that is that I have a 4k display and my images are quite large and seeing the end result in the bigger display is better for my workflow. I do edit all the image in the XP-Pen display, but I do check my photography display to be sure I’m not missing anything. I have calibrated the XP-Pen, and I’m quite happy with the results, while the display does not have 100% RGB I don’t often use it, I have my monitors all set for sRGB due to compatibility with the outside world.
Sample video
I created a small sample video of me using the display, so you can see how accurate the display is. In the video below, I will dodge the shallows of the threes, making them a bit lighter and also will darken the sky a little bit. I am very impressed with the responsiveness.
Conclusion
The XP-Pen Innovator 16 came to stay in my setup. I love how I can see directly on the screen what I’m doing, and it simply felt right. The display is super-thin (9mm) and very portable if I decide to take it out on my trips to edit on the go. There is no perfect device out there; however, this display has little I don’t like. There is room for improvement, I would consider a smaller bezel around the screen to give even more portability, and I would also increase the overall brightness. I will be using it only inside, but I wish it had a bit more, also the pen could have a magnet to “stick” to the side of the display. The last item I think could use some improvement is the stand, having a more flexible stand will be better for most. I wish I could try and maybe even replace one of my 27″ screens with the XP-Pen 24. The Innovator 16 is great for travelling, and I will be using it on my setup. I wish the screen was bigger due to the number of megapixels I work with nowadays (61). I do recommend the XP-Pen to anyone who is looking into this kind of displays.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
You can find more about the XP-Pen HERE.
I will leave here the direct links for the different markets.
DISCLOSURE
XP-Pen has not requested or paid me to do this review, but they did send me the display to test, this review is solely my own, and I used my own words and experience with this product.