
Tablet buttons and customizability: Most drawing tablets let you map keyboard shortcuts and other actions to buttons on the pen and tablet, but beginners probably won’t need more than a handful to cover the most-used actions.Battery-free pens are convenient and cost-effective over the long run. Pen type: All of the pens we tested are battery-free, which means you never need to charge the pen or swap out its batteries.After talking to our sources, we think the smaller drawing tablets offer the best quality for the price, especially for beginners. Medium (8-by-5-inch) and large (10-by-6-inch) drawing tablets are about as wide as a keyboard without a number pad, so they’re better suited for dedicated graphics work.

Small graphics tablets, such as the One by Wacom, are about the size of a mouse pad (with an active area around 6 by 4 inches) and highly portable. This can mean less arm fatigue, but when you’re working on large (or multiple) displays, you may need to zoom in to work with fine details or map the active area to a portion of the screen.

Drawing tablets in general are glitchy and hard to set up. “It’s super-important.” The driver affects how well the drawing tablet works with your computer, which software the tablet will work with, and the presence and severity of input lag. Compatibility and stability: Although “no one will explicitly ask about the quality of the driver software, they should,” Jim Mortensen said.

However, many of our long-term Wirecutter testers have used their tablets for years, and they say an extra $20 was worth paying for double the pressure sensitivity over the course of their artistic development. We found that a minimum of 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity (pressure sensitivities scale upward in intervals of 512) is plenty. The higher the pressure sensitivity, the better you can control the line weight (how thick and opaque the lines are, based on how hard you press down on the tablet with the pen). Pressure sensitivity: Many of our experts agreed that the most important feature of a drawing tablet is its pressure sensitivity.
