Monoprice 12x9 Inches Graphic Drawing Tablet

Back when I had this everything was great. However the oen requires a AAA battery and if you put it in wrong you've screwed up your whole operation. Sadly the replacement pen no.longer is sold on its own or at least wasn't when I tried to replace it. It was nice while it lasted but given monoprice's weird relationship with their drawing tablets possibly look at different models.

Before this tablet, I had a VisTablet 12'' Original. It worked nicely to begin with, but two months after purchase, the tablet started to malfunction. VisTablet's customer service people gave me the run around, rather than trying to help me solve the problem. They told me that the issue was my PC and that they couldn't do anything for me except try to test the unit on one of THEIR PCs. They wanted me to pay for shipping to send the item back to them, wait a few weeks while they received and tested the item, and THEN they said they'd decide whether or not to replace my unit, or just send the old one back. Huge hassle, and not worth it! I use my graphics tablets for work. If I didn't have a tablet for 3 to 4 weeks, I couldn't work for 3 to 4 weeks. I'm self employed and my graphics tablet is my main tool for my graphics/art business.So rather than deal with all of that nonsense, I ordered one of these Monoprice tablets, figuring it couldn't really be WORSE than the VisTablet was. Here is what I discovered:• This particular unit is HUGE. There's at least an inch of extra tablet on the left and right sides of the active area, plus a good three inches at the top and bottom sides. The active area is 12''x9'', which means that the overall unit is roughly 15''x15''. And it's HEAVY. It's a far larger unit than the VisTablet was, and that was somewhat off putting at first. It takes up far more desk or lap space than my other 12'' unit, which is not really optimal when you're working on a smaller desk or -- like me -- you keep your keyboard immediately next to the tablet so you can use all of your software's shortcuts while working.• The pen is very cheaply made. To insert the battery, you have to pull the whole pen apart, and all that holds the battery in place inside the pen is a thin aluminum strip that nearly broke right off the first time I attempted to put in the battery. The battery does make the pen heavier as well, but I don't have a problem with it as it's only the weight of a AA battery, and that's not much. I know some fans of Wacom tablets complain about battery operated pens for that reason, but if you can't consistently lift the weight of a single battery, there's something else wrong besides the pen. Haha.Less than a month after I had received my tablet and pen, the pen broke. I picked it up from its cradle one morning to get ready for work, and the button cap fell off before I'd even pressed it. From that point on, the pen did not function correctly. On the upside, I contacted Monoprice's customer support and they shipped me a new pen, free of charge. Unlike VisTablet, who tried to make me feel as though it were entirely my fault, the Monoprice tech people listened to me when I told them what I'd done to troubleshoot, and then immediately shipped a replacement. They didn't even ask for the old pen to be shipped back. That's a huge plus.There's no "eraser" on the end of the pen for this unit. I don't particularly mind that there isn't one, because all of my programs have easy shortcuts for the eraser tool, but I know some people really like having one, and if that's a deal breaker for you, then you might want to consider a different brand of tablet.• The tablet itself works well. The pressure sensitivity is far higher than the sensitivity on the VisTablet. It was easy to install the drivers and get this tablet running, right out of the box. I just followed the directions provided, and voila. I don't use the programmable shortcut buttons, so I don't have any feedback for those, unfortunately.Overall I'm satisfied with the performance of this Monoprice tablet -- which is a HUGE relief, because I did not want to have to spend a thousand dollars on a similarly-sized Wacom product. If Monoprice could just work a little on the durability of its pens, and slim down on the bulky size of the tablet itself, they'd give Wacom a run for their money!

My first rewiew was this: "I had the same problem of many others. Me and my computer technician tried unsuccessfully to install it many times. We installed the cd before, but nothing happened. We tried many times, in different ways, spending hours and patience but nothing. I can't tell if it works good or not, i can only say that is big, but for the rest, i wasn't able to make it works"After some weeks and many attempts my technician finally managed to install correctly the tablet. I don't know if it happened to others but in my case the only way was to create an apposite folder with another name cause the autorun of the cd cd put the files in the same folder of the wacom tablet, so if you have wacom drivers be careful. It's good enough, the pen is very sensitive even if too large in diameter, unfortunately tablet still does not work well with some programs, in other ones it works but crashes if the antivirus is active. So, after all it goes, but it is not perfect and I honestly expected a little more. Important: I thought I needed a big tablet but actually is too large, so I recommend: if you really want to buy a Monoprice tablet, buy a smaller one, believe me it's already large enough. Positive note: the ability to put drawings under the translucent sheet allows to trace the works, reducing the time of realization. Negative note: I don't know whether it's me or the pen, but the nibs consumed too quickly, after just few uses.Now I think I could give to the tablet 3/4 stars, all considered. Not bad.

Bought for my son, based on other reviews on Amazon, our findings mirror others findings; don't be put off by the (lack of) brand name, the tablet itself is excellent and a fraction of the price of equivalent big brand products, my son reports no latency problems, software installed and ran from cd no issues (windows 7 64 bit) all straightforward.Very good value for money, only issue is the pen, works fine but the pen battery compartment (top half of pen body) is a tight fit on the battery, (AAA), and the battery connector is a flimsy strip of pressed metal that makes contact with the + terminal, and is meant to hold the battery in place whilst you pull off the Pen body, but because of the tight fit, it is obvious that something is going to break if you just pull the back off, so I drilled a small hole in the end of the pen body to allow me to push a long thin screwdriver onto the end of the battery terminal and push the battery and bottom half of pen away from the upper, this stops any stress on the battery terminal, as soon as there is enough battery poking out of the pen body you can grip the battery and pen lower and separate them without damaging the battery terminal.

I had read some of the reviews with trepidation and was worried about if it worked on Win 7 but all of my fears were for nothing. The software on the disk is all that was required (no downloading from the makers site) and I plugged in and it worked seemlessly. For the price I was shocked at the size and the quality of the product.The only confusing part was after installing the battery into the pen it would not close properly, until I worked out that the arrow on the upper part of the pen had to line up with the metal back of the battery holder. There are no instructions so this was trial and error but i think that you could break it if not carefull with putting the pen back together so take heed of the arrow!I have used the device with photoshop and it works a treat

The hardware compares well with a Wacom tablet while being much cheaper. The pen is heavier than a Wacom pen because it contains a battery, and I don't think you can use multiple pens. (Not sure about this, but it only comes with one, and there is no eraser.) But it feels OK, and the accuracy is good.The software lets it down a bit. Even with the latest drivers (which you can get from the site of UC Logic, the original manufacturer) you can't remap all the buttons.You should consider whether you really need a tablet this large - it does allow for more detail, but it also requires larger arm movements, so I actually only use about half the area. (You can configure the usable area in the software, although again it is slightly clunky at this.)

I purchased this tablet in hopes that it would be a cheap alternative to wacom.I have NEVER had more issues with drivers, installation, configuration or compatibility with software, than this tablet gave me.You can probably get this tablet to work, but after spending 3 hours installing various drivers, enabling and disabling various settings, and restarting my computer 14 times, it still doesn't work.First it was the pressure sensitivity. When I got that working, the tablet didn't recognise the pen. When I got THAT working, it refused to draw anything but straight lines in my drawing software, and everything I could do to fix it had already been done. Even doing them over again didn't help, and as a result, my constant fiddling rendered my tablet completely useless. It won't do anything now.BE CAREFUL getting this tablet. It's cheap, it's got good specs, but it's a bitch to get working, if you can even get to that stage.

The tablet worked, but I had a lot of issues with it. The pen isn't great and doesn't register pressure and the tablet itself is much, much too big, especially as this tablet isn't specifically designed for drawing. After a few months mine stopped working and the lining on drawing pad started to peel off so I had to throw it away.