Intuos4, still a jerk

You’d think I’d exhaust all the possible complaints I could have with a piece of hardware I purchased almost a year ago, but no. Still angry. Recently I pulled up the driver diagnostic window while the pen was just touching the surface and noticed this:

You damned numbers.

31%? I am using 1/3 of the available pressure just by resting the pen on the surface?

Now to be fair, I just reset it to the defaults, and the grip pen is not light by any stretch of the imagination; an HB pencil this is not. But seriously? Thirty one percent of the pressure can be registered by the weight of the pen alone?

Maybe this makes sense in some technical way. Maybe I am just leaping at every chance to complain about my disappointing piece of $400 hardware.

My feeling, though, is that this is far too high for when you’re not actively applying pressure. Think of it this way: The Intuos4 can register 2048 levels of pressure. That means that at the default setting, the pen registers level 635 when you’re not even pressing down. Were I a scientist, I would say something scientific about the data at this point, like, “dang”.

Can this be combated with the pen settings? Probably. In fact, I think that’s my new “settings goal” for the tablet. Maybe I can finally dial it in to something I don’t want to bludgeon with an ox shank.