Best Tablet PC for 3d- Coaters?

[mosconariz]

I'm looking for the best tablet PC. I want to use it as a laptop and also as a a wacom-cintiq with good response and nice performance. I need it for sketching, painting, texturing and animation.

I know it's lenovo's, HP's, etc. Which would be the best choice?

[LJB]

I'm looking for the best tablet PC. I want to use it as a laptop and also as a a wacom-cintiq with good response and nice performance. I need it for sketching, painting, texturing and animation.

I know it's lenovo's, HP's, etc. Which would be the best choice?

Lenovo think pad with Wacom integration? Higher spec the better. but its like VERY expensive.

[jedwards]

Unfortunately you won't get both a good tablet experience and performance in the same machine (not yet anyway). There simply isn't a tablet pc in existence in my opinion that is pressure sensitive enough, and powerful enough to provide a satisfying experience. I've been watching and waiting for one to appear for years. You can get power in the current crop, but pen input is an afterthought in these devices.

That said, the purchase I made for a tablet in the end was a modbook (macbook to tablet conversion). I chose that one specifically because most of my personal work is already done on a mac at home, and most of the software I use runs on it quite well too. But but the main reason was because it has the best pen input of any tablet on the market today. Most give you 256 levels of pressure. The modbook offers 512 - the same sensitivity basically as the intuos 1 tablet I used on a desktop for almost 10 years. I bought it for painting, drawing, and sculpting. I wouldn't use it for doing high rez sculpting in 3dcoat though. It's simply not powerful enough for that and 3dcoat itself requires a very beefy machine if you want to do that sort of work - though the modbook runs zbrush beautifully even with higher rez sculpting.

3dc is great for blockouts, retopology and paint work as far as my needs from it so I can actually use it quite comfortably on my modbook for blockouts still.

I really enjoy being untethered from my desktop with it. It is by no means the ultimate machine for doing art on a tablet but it works very well and I'm quite happy with it. That said, if something better came out tomorrow I'd probably buy it and not look back. I really want to see tablets evolve to meet artists needs rather than as general computing or consumer devices. Nobody really seems to be paying attention though.