At its size, however, the Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 can be uncomfortable to sit close to for longer lengths of time. This is an issue to be aware of, as creating and drawing with any pen display will almost always involve you having to sit as close as possible to its screen. Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 review: performance

The Cintiq Pro 27's price is prohibitively high for many of us, who will have to keep our fingers crossed for a less expensive model that includes these new improvements in, perhaps, a smaller size. But for those who can fit the Cintiq Pro 27 into their budget, it’s an excellent centerpiece for any digital workstation for video, photography, and/or graphics. Setting the tablet up is a straightforward 'plug and play' process, and optional accessories such as a pen holder are easily attachable to the sides of the display. There are a number of mount holes around the display’s exterior, which are designed for workspace customization through the ability to mount devices such as cameras, microphones or lights. The Apple Pencil may seem hyper-futuristic as it charges via induction while it rests on the edge of an iPad display magnetically, but consider this: The Pro Pen 3 has no battery or cord, and it requires no charging at all. It uses Electromagnetic Resonance (EMR)—a technology Wacom developed in the 1980s—to work with the screen, as pen pressure and button presses are converted to electromagnetic waves. Furthermore, the Pro Pen 3 has a 10ms rated response time, versus the Apple Pencil’s 20ms. This, paired with a 120Hz refresh rate on the screen, equates to extremely low latency. The Pro Pen 3 has 8,192 pressure levels and supports 60 degrees of pen tilt angle. You can also customize the Express Keys to control a variety of actions—each button can essentially access the same range of Actions, and the Express Key panels house four buttons each. I found myself programming keyboard modifiers here and speeding up my workflows quite a bit—much of what I need to do in the Adobe suite begins with the Option or Command key.The Cintiq Pro 27 boasts a 30-bit color gamut, with 98% DCI-P3 and 99% Adobe RGB, as well as HDR Gamma support. As with other Wacom Cintiq models, the Pro 27’s parallax is generally very minimal, regardless of the angle you’re working with. The Cintiq Pro 27 showed good brightness at 344 nits, and its 991:1 contrast ratio effectively matched its 1,000:1 rating by Wacom. As for color-gamut testing, the Cintiq Pro 27 could hardly have done better. Its 100% Adobe RGB coverage (see chromaticity chart above) exceeded its 99% rating, and its DCI-P3 coverage (below) of 97.4% fell just barely short of its claimed 98%.

In recent years there have been an impressive number of new competitors in the graphics tablet market, giving a constantly growing list of alternatives for you to choose from.The Cintiq Pro 27 is a beast of a peripheral that weighs in at about 36 pounds when you include the official adjustable stand (the Cintiq itself can optionally be mounted onto a VESA-style arm). So while it is technically smaller than the Cintiq Pro 24, it still feels bigger. As mentioned, the Cintiq does support touch but I could take or leave them. For the most part, I left them. After some initial testing of the touch capabilities, which do work, I never felt there was a scenario where using them instead of the programmable buttons or my nearby keyboard was a better option. The Cintiq Pro 27’s screen was a little dimmer than I expected which resulted in colors appearing to be a bit muted, but the display still has incredibly great resolution and color accuracy. The grip and control buttons on the sides are pretty useful — if for nothing else other than repositioning the screen — and the Pro Pen 3, while not the most impressive looking, was incredibly accurate and handled exceptionally well, especially since the nib didn’t have the trademark “wobble” that’s present in nearly every other pen on the market. Finally, the entire surface supports multi-touch, so you can leverage the entire screen as a touchpad for hand gestures for additional workflow enhancements should you desire. Like the Apple Pencil for iPads, the Pro Pen 3 can be customized—its three buttons can host a far wider range of commands than the Pencil’s double-tap, however, which is fairly limited in scope. The display will begin to recognize the stylus at about 5mm away from the screen’s surface, so any shortcuts you program on the buttons will only work from that distance as well. This is notable for those who are transitioning from a keyboard-and-mouse setup. If you assign a keyboard shortcut (Command+Z for undo, say) to a Pro Pen 3 button, it might take a minute to get used to the fact that the Pro Pen 3’s “undo” will work only when your pen is very close to the screen. For some, this will take a bit of time to become second nature—or, you could assign functions to the stylus buttons that, typically, would only be handled by a mouse, and save keyboard shortcuts for the Express Keys on the display itself. For me, this proved the fastest way to work, at least in the early phases of testing. The possibilities for setting up a hyper-efficient workspace in the Wacom Center app seem pretty wide open, as we’ll discuss next.

If you get one of these, just be prepared for the space this thing takes up. During my actual testing, it’s safe to say I had very limited space and it wasn’t the most ergonomic of environments. Pressure sensitivity for the Wacom Pro Pen 3 is very much on the higher end at 8,192 levels, which is great for anyone who expects to work with more specific details in their design. Of course, some softwares you might use will have different level caps, so it isn’t necessarily guaranteed that you’ll always be working with the pen’s peak sensitivity. Design-wise I get it, and with a larger workspace it really isn’t an issue, but if space is limited it is an annoyance. The Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 is All I Want to Use NowThe new big daddy of the Wacom range, announced in September 2022, the Cintiq Pro 27 boasts a majorly upgraded display – a true 10-bit 4K reference-quality unit, on par with a premium monitor. It’s the biggest tablet in the current family, with a 27-inch digital canvas, but despite this it actually has a smaller physical footprint than the previous Cintiq Pro 24, thanks to significantly slimmed bezels and a generally sleeker design. However, we did find that not all of the Cintiq Pro 27’s gestures would translate to every program. This isn’t necessarily a problem that can be blamed on the display itself, but it’s something to be aware of when preparing to work with it. Naturally, as a multi-touch display, the Cintiq Pro 27 is very responsive when using either the pen or your fingers to work on designs. At times, these levels of sensitivity can actually be a frustration when in use – if you’re drawing with the pen while multi-touch is enabled, for example, it’s not uncommon to start a pen stroke and then have it evaporate because you’ve accidentally grazed the display with your finger. You also have access to a radial menu—the top Express Key on the left, by default, calls up the radial menu onscreen. In fact, there are two radial menus—one called Radial, the other called Express. Both pull up similar-looking wheels of useful commands and options, and each option can be swapped out for something else. The wheel is useful for accessing commonly needed actions, like Save or Tab, that might not quite warrant their own physical Express Key. When it appears onscreen, its circular interface hovers over whatever app you have open, taking up little space, with its options easily selectable. The Wacom Intuos Pro is a graphics tablet rather than a pen display, meaning you’ll need to hook it up to some kind of external display like a tablet or monitor. Once this is done – and the setup process is pretty intuitive and straightforward – you’ve got a highly effective drawing tablet on your hands, and one that comes at a great price.