After unpacking a Monoprice Creator 22 graphical pen display and installing its driver software, Windows 10 detected a pen input device and activated a few inking tools. One example was a digital sticky note I could use to jot things down. These tools were enough for me to verify that position and pressure information is getting into the system. I also noticed that whenever there is pen activity, one CPU core is completely consumed with kernel-level tasks. This is a hint the Bosto driver is spinning a CPU polling for input data whenever the pen is active. It is certainly a valid way to maximize pen input responsiveness, but not the most efficient. On the upside, we’re now living in era of multicore processors. So I guess it doesn’t matter too much if a CPU core is entirely occupied with pen input.

Sticky notes are fun, but I wanted to use a more powerful tool. Since I’m unwilling to spend significant money until I have more experience, I will start with the free option: GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). Loading up the current public stable release (2.10.32 as of this writing) I found it did not respond to my pen. Rummaging around the internet eventually found that GIMP only added support for Windows Ink compatible pen input devices about a year ago, in development version 2.99.8. Uninstalling the stable release and installing the development release (2.99.12 of this writing) allowed me to select Windows Ink as GIMP’s input API and draw using my new graphic display.

GIMP is a lot more powerful than a digital sticky note, and its user interface is infamously hostile to beginners. There are official documentation and online forums, of course, but I think a guided tour might be a good idea as well. I considered The Book of GIMP (*) by Lecarme and Delvare, but it was written almost ten years ago in 2013 for GIMP 2.8 so many details will be outdated. I might still skim through this book for the major strokes, or I might find a different book.

Last but not least, I need to put some effort into learning to draw. I’ve been doodling random things since I was old enough to hold a crayon, but I’ve never put any rigorous effort into developing the skill. I’m starting with The Fundamentals of Drawing (*) by Barber. Not because the book is great (I don’t know enough to judge yet) but because Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature got far enough for the first exercise: practice hand control by drawing basic shapes. Can I stay focused enough to practice these drills and get good at them, so I could contemplate actually buying the book for the rest of it? Time will tell.

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(*) Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Ever since I saw my first Wacom Cintiq, I’ve thought graphic pen displays were a cool technology. However, they were priced for professional artists and I couldn’t justify spending that kind of money just for messing around. But when Monoprice held a clearance sale, I could not resist a Creator 22 (Item #39945) for just $170.

The underlying panel has the good color and viewing angle typical of IPS displays. With a 1920×1080 “Full HD” resolution it is acceptable but not great. Noticeably lagging in today’s world of 4K UHD and Apple’s “Retina” displays. There is a tangle of wires feeding into the back of this unit. A HDMI cable for video, a 12V DC @ 2A power supply, and a USB-A port for graphical input. In theory USB Type-C can handle video, power, and input all in a single cable, but we don’t have that advancement here. Heck, peripherals like this aren’t even supposed to use Type-A ports (peripherals are supposed to be Type-B) but here we are anyway.

According to the enclosed manual, there was supposed to be a USB flash drive in the box with device drivers, but I didn’t find one. Fortunately, there was a download link on the Monoprice product page. While the product has a Monoprice name on it, the driver installer showed a different name: Bosto. Looking over Bosto Tablet’s website, it appears Monoprice Creator 22 is a rebranded variation of the Bosto 22Mini.

Part of Bosto’s driver is a calibration app, where we are to tap the pen at crosshairs drawn in each corner so the driver can map their position to onscreen display. Unfortunately, this calibration app doesn’t work properly on setups with multiple monitors: the crosshairs were drawn on the wrong monitor and I couldn’t figure out how to move it. To work around this issue, I disabled all other monitors to run the calibration routine. Afterwards I could re-enable remaining monitors and thankfully pen input knew to work on the correct display. However, despite running the calibration routine, the cursor position did not always match up with pen position. It seemed fine near the center, but near the edges & corners the position would be off by up to 3mm. I would not be happy if I had paid full list price, but I was willing to tolerate it at discounted price.

Out of the box, there was a clear protective sheet of plastic attached to a tab that told me to remove before use. Under that glossy sheet of plastic is another sheet which is intended to stay. This second sheet has a matte surface that serves two purposes here. In addition to an anti-reflective effect, the texture feels better than a slick glass surface for drawing. Unfortunately, this textured surface sheet is already trying to peel from the monitor, leaving white bubbles all around the edges. I presume this texture sheet will eventually wear out and would need to be replaced, but I found no replacements from either Monoprice or Bosto. This is not a dealbreaker as I might never use it enough to introduce noticeable wear. The other consumable is the pen nib, and here Monoprice was generous. The manual listed six replacements, but I actually had twenty in my box.

Given the above, “acceptable but not great” is my general summary of the Monoprice Creator 22 at its clearance $170 price point. I wouldn’t have been happy if I had paid full price, probably telling myself “shoulda sprung for a Wacom One” if I had. But at clearance price it is a great entry point for me to mess around. If the novelty of pen input fails to capture my long-term attention (quite likely, as I know myself) I still have a serviceable ~22″ IPS 1080p HDMI screen. And if playing with pen input turns into something with actual utility, I may justify moving up to a Wacom Cintiq.

In the meantime, my first impressions here were based on some minimal time with my new toy. Roughly on par with the amount of time I got to play with a Surface Pen on a Surface tablet or an Apple Pencil on an iPad. So relative to a tablet-based drawing solutions, my initial highlights are:

Pro:

• Will never have palm/finger interference problems.
• Much larger surface area.
• Textured drawing surface feels better than glass.
• Affordable (due to clearance sale.)

Con:

• Requires a computer.
• Tangle of cables
• Lower pixel density.
• Dead-end discontinued product.

For decades I’ve been interested in graphical pen displays that integrate a computer monitor with a graphics tablet into a single unit. There’s something very satisfying about drawing directly on screen and see it respond like real paper, yet with all the flexibility of working digitally. This technology started with professional gear costing thousands of dollars, and now we can get very close with commodity touchscreen tablets. Companies like Apple and Microsoft sell pencil accessories to turn their respective tablets into drawing sketchpads. Even though they haven’t worked well for me due to touch input interfering with stylus input, I was close to buying an Apple Pencil for my iPad. But then I saw Monoprice clearing out their inventory of graphical pen display.

As a company, Monoprice finds markets where incumbents thrive on huge profit margins. They find a contract manufacturer to build products under the Monoprice name and sell at a lower price. Monoprice rise to fame came from their HDMI cables that are a fraction of the price of Monster Cable (& friends). With that success, Monoprice used the same tactic to enter a wide range of markets ranging from 3D printers to camping equipment. But not all of their experiments were successful. Occasionally Monoprice decides a particular market is not worth further investment and it appears graphical peripherals have become the latest example.

For the past few years, Monoprice offered a line of graphical input devices. There were several graphical pen displays for several hundred dollars, and a few affordable drawing tablets (without integrated displays) for tens of dollars. These products undercut pricing of Wacom equivalents by at least 30%, but that still left them more expensive than I could justify buying. Especially when the software situation is an unknown given Wacom’s status as de-facto standards in this field: Every single artistic application will be compatible with Wacom devices, the same guarantee could not be made of Monoprice counterparts. Apparently enough people thought the same ad I did because in the past few weeks I noticed one of those tablets listed in a Monoprice clearance sale email. I checked Monoprice site and saw this was what remained of their product line.

Looking at that feature chart, my attention was drawn to the “Touch Screen” row. Given my past struggles trying to draw on a tablet screen that was also sensitive to my finger and hands, I liked the idea of getting a graphical display that was not a touchscreen. I don’t have to struggle with tuning “palm rejection” settings if the screen never cared about my palm to begin with! Unfortunately, the Monoprice clearance sale that brought this to my attention had discounted item #40443, the lone product on this chart that was also a touchscreen. Since that’s not what I wanted, I held off buying hoping one of the other items would be discounted in a later sale. My patience paid off when item #39945 was discounted from its $380 list price down to $170. This was too tempting to pass up so now I have a Monoprice Creator 22 Graphic Pen Display.

Despite my minimal artistic skill, I’ve long been fascinated by the possibility of using pen-based screen input for a digital drawing sketchbook. But I could not justify buying the good gear. Which meant a long string of experiments in more affordable approaches filled with frustration and disappointment.

My earliest experience was doodling with a small iPAQ (a Windows CE-based device) which used a sharp pointed stylus on a resistive touchscreen. These early PDAs like PalmPilot and Apple Newton barely sufficed for note taking. Given their low resolution, poor responsiveness, and no pressure level sensitivity, they compared poorly to contemporary Wacom drawing tablets.

Following Apple’s trailblazing iPhone, cell phones moved to higher resolution screens and capacitive touchscreens. Any phones with ambition to be competitive must deliver instant visual response to touch input, which is great for drawing responsiveness. But those capacitive touchscreens also eliminated the ability to use stylus for fine point accuracy. There existed “capacitive touchscreen stylus” but every unit I had tried merely delivered a wide touch surface as inaccurate as a finger. And finally, capacitive touchscreens introduced a new problem: I could no longer rest my hand on the screen for stability, as that would be treated as additional touch input messing things up.

I had high hopes for my next step: a Samsung 500T Windows 8 tablet with integrated pen digitizer using technology licensed from Wacom. The screen was much larger than a phone, and the Wacom digitizer delivered pressure data. Unfortunately, overall system responsiveness (not just to pen input) was intolerably slow. Just one of many problems which made that tablet into a big sack of sadness.

After that disappointment, I went upscale and upgraded my laptop to a Microsoft Surface Pro. It also had a Wacom-licensed pen input digitizer, and much faster hardware for better responsiveness. I could mostly use it as the digital sketchbook I always thought would be neat to have. The biggest complaint was that I never mastered a posture that would keep my hand off the screen. The Surface Pro had a basic form of “palm rejection” like the 500T: touch input could be disabled when the pen is active. But this required keeping the pen in range of screen digitizer. If I lifted the pen more than a few millimeters, it would fall out of range. Which meant the tablet reverted to touchscreen input and immediately engulfed in chaos caused by my palm.

After that era, consumer level tablets moved away from Wacom technology. Microsoft’s Surface Pen has since switched to a different technology, and Apple launched their own take with the Apple Pencil. In addition to pressure sensing, both of these technologies added the ability to sense tilt angle, literally opening up a new dimension in digital sketching. When I tried floor demonstration units at Best Buy and Apple Store, I was quite impressed. But with my drawing style and posture, they both still suffered from unwanted hand input. This will be an ongoing problem on anything designed primarily for finger touch input. What I wanted is a product primarily designed for pen input and ignores my fleshy parts, but that is a very limited product niche. I didn’t think I could ever justify the cost of that niche until Monoprice decided to clear out some inventory.

One skill unique to digital artists is the ability to draw on a tablet while looking at a separate screen. I can’t think of any other art medium with such a separation between an artists’ hands and their workpiece. Towards the end of The Line King: The Al Hirschfeld Story(*) documentary was a clip of Hirschfeld trying a drawing tablet. This lifelong master of pen and paper struggled to make a basic sketch, saying “It’s almost impossible to control […] I supposed it is possible to control it, it’d just require another lifetime to do it, that’s all.“

The separation of drawing tablet and scree is a curious evolution of computer input devices, because things didn’t start out that way. Decades ago, specialized computers had light pen input devices that allowed pointing and drawing directly on screen. It made it all the way down to consumer (or at least business) level hardware with provisions on early IBM PC video cards.

But the tech manual explains what it's for:
THE LIGHT PEN! Cause those were still a thing back then, as mice weren't the dominant pointing device yet. pic.twitter.com/8OzwyJKIYX

— foone (@Foone) October 18, 2018

I guess early product designers assumed people wouldn’t put up with trying to manipulate input that was separate from its screen representation. If so, the computer mouse proved that assumption wrong. People were indeed willing to learn to manipulate with physically separated input devices when there is enough productivity at low enough cost to be worth learning a new skill. The same basic arguments applied to artistic creations. Given the advantages of digital creation over physical media (ease of edit, archive, copy, transmit, etc.) some artists were willing to learn to draw on a desktop tablet while looking at a screen.

But human beings still prefer to have visual feedback physically corresponding to manipulation input. And thankfully technology has advanced enough to give that back to us, at least in some contexts. We interact with modern slab-faced smartphones with its touchscreen instead of a mouse, and artists can get graphical pen displays that integrate drawing tablet capability with a computer screen. I remember when the technology became a practical product and watched an artist demonstrate the first Wacom Cintiq. While being well aware that most of the skill is in the artist, I was nevertheless blown away by how immediate, responsive, and thereby intuitive drawing on a graphical pen display was. And I was not alone, as that first Cintiq was successful enough to launch a full and still evolving product line of graphical displays. It was extremely expensive, but it meant an artist no longer had to draw on one device while looking at another device. A capability well worth the cost for artistic creators.

As a software code jockey with no artistic skill to speak of, I had no justification to spend thousands of dollars on a graphical pen input display. It was just a novelty that I loved to play with whenever I had the chance. I got close with a few Windows and iOS tablets, but it wasn’t quite the same.

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(*) Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.