Wacom Bamboo Fun

Wacom pen tablets have been a favourite of design and photography professionals for years. Wacom's Bamboo Fun line brings pen and tablet computing to another audience: the casual home or office user.

Bamboo tablets offer consumers a welcome alternative to a traditional mouse. Using a mouse can be like trying to draw with a bar of soap, requiring lots of repositioning and repetitive movements.

By contrast, Bamboo Fun tablets are designed to provide a more natural experience, similar to touching pen to paper. The tablet represents your computer monitor in a one-to-one relationship, so that a stroke of the pen translates to a matching line on the screen.

The pen that comes with the Bamboo Fun tablet is pressure-sensitive, allowing you to make fine lines or bold strokes by varying how hard you press.

Wacom's Bamboo line consists of two products -- Bamboo Fun (reviewed here) and Bamboo. Bamboo Fun, for creative consumers, replaces the Graphire4. (Creative professionals are still best served by Wacom's Intuos and Cintiq lines.) Bamboo Fun is available in a choice of four colours (black, white, silver or blue) and two sizes (small, also known as the A6, or medium, A5).

Both sizes include a cordless pen with eraser, and a cordless mouse for use on the tablet. The Bamboo Fun package also comes with a collection of popular design software -- Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 or Corel Painter Essentials, and ArtRage2.

The small Bamboo Fun (a roughly 6x4in active area), at $159, is the best value in the line, taking into account these extra goodies. The medium Bamboo Fun (a roughly 9x6in active area) costs $299.

All of the Bamboo tablets are thin, lightweight and stylish. They feature four programmable ExpressKeys, useful for accessing frequent keystrokes or launching selected applications. The Touch Ring at the top of the tablet resembles an iPod clickwheel. Move your finger around the Touch Ring to easily zoom or scroll through a document.

The Bamboo Fun pen is sleek and comfortable. It features two buttons that can be set to a choice of functions, or to which you can assign a custom pop-up menu of your favourite commands.

Bamboo Fun tablets are great for creative activities, from sketching to scrapbooking to photo retouching. They also offer a unique opportunity to integrate handwriting with digitised documents.

Use a Bamboo tablet to add a handwritten signature to a typed letter, jot down quick notes, or mark up a document. You can leave your handwriting as is, or automatically convert it into typewritten text.

There aren't many down sides to Bamboo Fun tablets. Our wish list does include a wireless version that would not need to be tethered to the computer; it would also be nice if the pen buttons were repositioned so left-handers would be less likely to run into them inadvertently.