Aiptek Slim 12.1 Inch USB Tablet List Price: $119.99

“You get what you pay for”

In the world of Graphics Tablets, there are many pretenders to the throne currently held by Wacom and the same adage applies to this industry too. Although some graphics tablets are cheaper, you don’t always get a good deal.

The Aiptek Slim is a generous sized tablet, measuring at an impression 12.1 inches across. There are a vast number of programmable buttons around the outside edges of the active area that allow you to quickly access commonly used functions and options, without having to reach for your keyboard or deal with menu items. These are pretty much standard for most graphics tablets these days.

The technical specifications of the Aiptek Slim are also good, featuring 1000 lines per inch (lpi) resolution and 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity. Then wireless pen supplied is also of adequate build quality and features a few buttons to help you switch between different tools.

So, on the surface, the Slim seems pretty good. Unfortunately, this is where the good parts of the review end. We used a rebadged model of the Apitek tablet. As we are based in the UK, the tablet comes under the Medion brand name, which is synonymous with cheaper electronic goods, sold at cheaper stores. The tablet itself is physically identical to the Aiptek version and the software and documentation is the same too.

Here at Graphics Tablet Reviews, we use a variety of different computers. Mac’s, Windows 7 PCs and Windows XP too. We had major issues getting the tablet to work with our Snow Leopard based Macbook and also had some issues with the Windows 7 build PC too. In the end, we had to manually hack things out of the registry to get it to work properly and resorted to getting different drivers to allow it to work on the Macbook. All in all, if a normal consumer bought this product, they may have had serious issues getting it to work properly.

After the initial teething problems, we were left with a standard graphics tablet that performed adequately in our tests. The pen tracking was good and the size of the active area and lightweight design were the plus points for us. We used Adobe Photoshop for most of the tests and found the Apitek easy to use and accurate.

This graphics tablet does not have any “wow factor” moments. You get what you pay for. A medium quality, cheap graphics tablet, that will hopefully perform well on your machine. There are a slew of bad reviews of this tablet on places like Amazon, yet they continue to sell in their 1000’s each year. If you can’t afford a Wacom tablet, this may be an option for you, but expect to be happy with it rather than ecstatic.

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