Review: Xencelabs Pen Tablet Medium Bundle | Cirstyn Bech-Yagher

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The newest rival to Wacom’s Intuos Pro Medium is an intutive, well-designed graphics tablet with great driver software. Cirstyn Bech-Yagher put it through its paces with a range of 2D and 3D applications.

 My first graphics tablet came from a store at Heathrow Airport last century. It was a humble blue-and-white Wacom Graphire, and I used it to bits. That cheap little tablet got me invested in more expensive Wacom products for over a decade after its demise, until Xencelabs’ Pen Tablet Medium Bundle caught my eye.

Pronounced ‘sense labs’, Xencelabs is gaining traction in the CG community as a serious challenger to Wacom. Using artist collaborations to deliver on its promise of intuitive, non-distracting drawing tools, the company aims to create versatile and easy-to-use products, with useful and innovative features to boot.

Having had one foot in CG art and the other in software development for two decades, statements like that set my hype radar pinging. It began pinging even harder when I read Xencelabs’ customer promise that its products will be “reliable, properly tested, and developed with the input of professional creatives”.

Like many others, I’ve had countless issues over the years with dead or crashing drivers, input and Windows Ink problems, and broken promises of fixes from hardware and software vendors alike, so I was definitely curious to see whether Xencelabs would keep that promise.