Product Description

Bamboo Fun lets you get hands-on with your creative projects, giving you the benefits of Multi-Touch along with the comfort and precision of Wacom’s ergonomically-designed pen. With Multi-Touch, you can navigate, scroll, and work with simple gestures in an area larger than on mobile devices or laptop trackpads. For precision work, pick up the pressure-sensitive pen to draw, sketch, edit photos, and add handwritten elements to your creations. The generous size of Bamboo Fun gives you lots of space for creative freedom, making it simple and comfortable to use. Bamboo Fun works with your existing computer: desktop or laptop, PC or Mac. Attach it to a standard USB port and set it comfortably by your keyboard. You can even customize your Bamboo Fun experience by assigning your own shortcuts to the four ExpressKeys. Available in a stylish silver color, Bamboo Fun will complement your current setup. It includes valuable additions that make it ideal for your creative projects.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #98 in Consumer Electronics
• Color: Silver
• Brand: Wacom
• Model: CTH661
• Dimensions: .20" h x 8.80" w x 13.30" l, 2.15 pounds

Features

• Powerful tablet helps you create digital art, embellish photos, draw by hand, and more
• Intuitive ¿Multi-Touch¿ system lets you navigate your computer using just your fingertips
• Included stylus features 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity; provides a pen-on-paper feel
• Compatible with Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP (Service Pack 2), and Mac OS X (10.4.8 or higher)
• Backed by Wacom¿s 1-year manufacturer¿s warranty

From the Manufacturer
Combining intuitive design and versatility, the Bamboo Fun is a powerful creative workstation that lets PC and Mac users create digital art with an organic, hands-on feel. Using an innovative tablet and Wacom's "Multi-Touch" system, users can manipulate images and navigate the Web using simple gestures and finger taps. When combined with Wacom's pen-input technology, the Bamboo Fun allows you to write, doodle, and embellish with ease.

Included pen features 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity for precise drawings.

Large, textured work surface and customizable keys give you artistic control.

Multi-Touch lets you scroll, zoom, and rotate your screen with simple hand gestures.

Sleek, Stylish, and Easy to Use
Measuring 13.3 by 8.8 inches, the Bamboo Fun is compact enough to store comfortably in a laptop case. It features a large and responsive active area, providing enough workspace for even your most ambitious projects. For added convenience, four ExpressKeys provide quick access to user-defined shortcuts.

The tablet comes with a battery-free pen with an easy-to-grip design, so you can have maximum control over your drawing. The work surface is textured, providing a pen-on-paper feel. It's also reversible, so you can use it comfortably whether you're right- or left-handed.

The Bamboo Fun is simple to set up. Simply plug the tablet into your computer via a USB port, install the provided drivers, and you're ready to go. You'll be doodling, writing, and painting in minutes.

Enhance Creativity with Multi-Touch Technology
With the Bamboo Fun, Wacom has implemented a new technology called Multi-Touch. Typically, tablets require you to use the stylus for navigation, but Multi-Touch provides a comfortable hands-on alternative. It allows you to quickly navigate through your computer with a single finger. You can also scroll, zoom, and rotate your screen with simple hand gestures. It's intuitively-designed and easy to use -- even if you're new to the touch experience.

For precision work, you can use the included pen. When you use the pen, the screen will automatically recalibrate for more precise use. In your hands, the pen quickly becomes an all-purpose art tool. It features 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity, allowing you to perform tasks ranging from fine hand-writing to wide-brush painting. You can add hand-drawn embellishments to your favorite photos, add life to your digital sketches, or provide a personal touch to your scrapbooking pages.

First-Class Visual Editing Software
The tablet also comes with a full suite of visual editing software, including Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0 Win/6.0 Mac and Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 WE3--valued separately at several hundred dollars.

Bamboo Fun is compatible with Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP (Service Pack 2) and Mac OS X (10.4.8 or higher.) It requires a powered USB drive, a colored screen, and a CD/DVD drive.

What's in the Box
Bamboo Fun tablet, Bamboo Fun pen, Quick Start guide, installation CD (includes driver software, interactive tutorial and user's manual), and software DVD.

Customer Reviews

Something for everyone, perfect for no one
This review will be most helpful to someone who is relatively unfamiliar with graphics tablets, as I was before selecting this item for review.

Other than the keyboard, the mouse is the most universal computer control device. But trying to draw with a mouse is clumsy. Pen type drawing tablets were invented to offer a more natural input device for any bitmapped graphics programs such as photo retouching and freehand art applications. The other popular input device, generally found on notebooks, is the trackpad, which works directly with your fingers. Recent Apple MacBook trackpads offer two finger stretching and rotating and other fancy tricks. Some people would like to use this method with their desktop computer; Bamboo Fun is in part a giant trackpad that allows you to do that.

Before buying it, be aware that Wacom, the largest producer of such things, offers many different products and variants at many price points. These range from large pen-only tablets for professional graphic artists ($430) down to small "amateur" tablets with reduced spatial resolution and pressure resolution, for sixty bucks. There are versions with only the track-pad mode, only the pen mode, or both. The product reviewed here ($169) is a bundle which puts together several things at the sub-professional level. The device does both the track-pad and pen modes, is medium size, and the package includes bundled software: Photoshop Elements (the non-pro version of Photoshop, normally $90), Corel Painter Essentials (the non-pro version of Painter, $40) and a program called Nik Color Efex. (The latter is tossed in but doesn't really belong here; it's a set of advanced filters and tricks which work under Photoshop and would normally be used by advanced photographers. But quite expensive if bought alone.) Bundles like this are questionable. If you really use all this software, it's a bargain. But if you are a serious photographer, you probably already have full Photoshop, so Elements is superfluous. Receiving Corel Painter Essentials was a nice surprise however - it's a lovely, fun program which can do things such as turn photos into simulated oil paintings.

Let's talk about the tablet functions. One quickly becomes habituated to using the mouse so changing to any other device takes a lot of relearning. The utility of changing to a trackpad with two finger options has a lot to do with the type of software you are working in; for most everyday applications there is not much to be gained. For sorting photos in Aperture, yes, could be quicker after some practice. A big trackpad like this is a personal preference - you will love it or hate it, not in-between. But it would be hard to say it is 'absolutely necessary' for any particular task.

The pen function is a different story. Freehand drawing programs or Photoshop effects cannot be manipulated easily with a mouse - you really need the pen, which is pressure sensitive and can be adjusted in many ways. This one worked well, and makes Corel Painter or Photoshop much easier to use with precision.

It all works well, but who is this product really for? As noted, the Bamboo Fun package throws in a bit of everything in nonprofessional versions. But for a 'sampler,' the $170 price is not really cheap. To be worth the price, you will want to be sure that you need both the trackpad and the pen functions, plus the bundled software. I suspect there are few customers who fall in this category. Most graphics-oriented buyers will know what they intend to do. If you only want the pen function for example, you may be better off spending about the same money to get the high performance, higher res professional version of this one Wacom item (called Intuos line). This would probably be my own choice; a top grade pen for Photoshop and skip the rest.

This Bamboo Fun package might be a good option for a school or family with a variety of different users. But a focussed artist with a specific task in mind will do better to choose a more specialized Wacom product.

Fantastic tablet for the money!
I spent quite a bit of time looking at various tablets, reading reviews, and trying to figure out which had the most bang for the buck; the Bamboo Fun won in just about every category. Please note that I am not a professional graphic artist, just a hobbyist (though technically savvy enough to understand the features [eg pressure sensitivity]), so I'm reviewing it from that perspective.

Installation was a snap. Download the latest drivers from the Wacom site, plug it into a USB port, and you're all set. I tried it out on two laptops and a desktop and installation was flawless on each.

The tablet is thin and light, with a more-than-adequate amount of active space (I wanted something that would let me do longer strokes without feeling cramped). The multi-touch capability is really nice with graphics programs that support it; being able to pan and zoom with my left hand while my right remains mostly dedicated to drawing is great (and a quick press of one of the Bamboo's 4 buttons will turn touch off, which comes in handy [no pun intended]). For reference, the touch-sensitive area is 7.5" x 5.1" and the pen-active area is a fairly generous 8.5" x 5.4". You can configure it for left-handed use (lefties rejoice!).

The tablet is very smooth and responsive with Sketchbook Pro and ArtRage 2.5. I wasn't that thrilled with Corel Painter 4 Essentials, which comes bundled with it; the UI was clunky and not very intuitive (spend the $20 on ArtRage instead - you won't regret it). The Bamboo Fun also comes bundled with Photoshop Essentials, which should be useful if you don't already have a full version of Photoshop.

The battery-less pen, with two configurable buttons and 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity, is very comfortable in the hand and I admit it, I love the eraser on the end. :) The tablet has a fabric loop on one side for holding the pen when transporting it.

The tablet comes with three extra nibs and an extraction tool, which isn't listed in the product description.

Overall, for a couple of steps above entry level I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Bamboo Fun as a great tablet for the price.

Great tool. Easy to learn. (But few remember what it took to learn how to use the mouse).
I received this tablet from Amazon in great condition and hooked it up. It acted funky initially, but after reading the instructions in the installation CD, it said to install the software BEFORE you hook it up. Once I did that, the tablet was very responsive to the "Touch" capability. I have a Mac with 3 Monitors and it registered perfectly across all three monitors.

The tutorial that came with it was good for learning the basics. However, it is a "Flash" interactive tutorial and the response is not the same as on your desktop or with apps.

On my Mac running Snow Leopard, I found that all the gestures worked as advertised, except the DRAG feature. The user manual (a PDF on the DVD) said to re-install the drivers and had a link to Wacon to find the latest driver. The re-installation was easy and good, but did not solve the problem. The user manual also had a number for Tech Support. I called it and talked to a Support Person (IN THE US!). They were very helpful and did NOT treat me like an idiot like so many tech support people do. They walked me through several processes to figure out what was wrong, but it did not solve the problem. I AM happy to report that it was not the Tablet's or the Software problem, but MINE. I found that I was not performing the "gesture" quickly enough to Drag items. Once I figured that out, that feature worked as advertised.

I can safely say, that the Touch tablet will be able to replace my mouse. The transition is interesting, however. I have been using a mouse since 1985. People don't remember how long it took to learn the motor skills to use the mouse. Currently I am about 1/2 as productive with the Touch Tablet as I am with a mouse, but I've only had the Tablet 1 day... and I'm patiently getting better and faster.

The scroll gesture works well with Browsers, Email, Adobe Products and Word Processors... so far so good.

I have used the Gestures with a browser and love the Zoom/Zoom out gestures. It also works with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (so does the rotate object jesture.) However, it is a little jerky and will take some getting used to.

The pen works VERY well with Illustrator and Photo shop. It take a little getting used to because to move the mouse to a location, you "hover" and don't touch the pad until you are ready to select it or draw. But I am rapidly getting used to it over the mouse. (Remember I've only had this thing 1 day.) I can see this as a real bridge between art skills on a pad and paper and tablet and computer.

Overall, I love this tool. People in other reviews are not satisfied with the edge response limitations of the tablet, but one quickly gets used to it, just like the mouse.

My reasons for the 4 rather than a 5 rating have to do with one issue. I am left handed. Although one can set the tablet up for left handed operation (and it works for a left hander in right hand mode - with a couple of concessions), there is a problem when one boots up the computer. Because the preferences for left handed operation are stored IN THE PERSONAL LOG ON, if you use the tablet in left hand mode, the preferences are not turned on before you log on. That means ALL the motions are reversed!!! A real bummer. But, what I have done is keep it in right hand mode (keeping the orientation of the tablet in right hand mode) and then making the consessions after I log in.

Summary.

Great tool. Learning curve about the same as it takes to learn the mouse the first time (which very few of us really remember). Has replaced my mouse. Is working well in Illustrator and Photoshop.