Wacom has thrown a tablet-shaped curveball to digital creatives waiting for Apple’s highly anticipated OLED iPads. The company on Wednesday introduced the Wacom Movink 13, its own OLED-based offering aimed at creatives who need a highly portable display drawing tablet.
Available now from the Wacom web store for $750, the Movink features a 13.3-inch Full HD OLED display from Samsung, giving it several advantages over comparable mid-range LED-based tablets. Most notable is the lack of a backlight – according to Wacom, this not only prevents light leakage and excessive heat (the latter of which is a known annoyance for display tablet users), but also allows the tablet to be more compact.
Wacom says the Movink is the “thinnest and lightest” pen display tablet it has ever made. It weighs 420 grams (14.8 ounces) and is between 4 and 6.6 mm thick. In comparison, according to Wacom, it is 66 percent thinner and 55 percent lighter than the comparably sized Wacom One 13 Touch. This also makes it lighter than the current 12.9-inch iPad Pro model at 682 grams (24 ounces) and has a similar thickness.
It doesn’t mind those messy three-in-one cables either – the Wacom Movink 13 uses a single USB-C to USB-C cable for both power and connectivity. The tablet supports Windows, macOS, ChromeOS and Android, and there is also a second USB-C port for additional power if the connected device does not have enough juice.
Users can also expect a wider color gamut and deeper blacks, with a contrast ratio of 100,000:1, a hundred times higher than what the recently released Wacom Cintiq Pro 17 offers. The Wacom Movink is validated for Pantone and Pantone SkinTone and offers 100 According to Wacom, DCI-P3 coverage is 95% and Adobe RGB coverage is 95%. The faster response time for OLED also reduces pen latency to under one millisecond.
Speaking of pens, the Movink comes with a special version of Wacom’s Pro Pen 3 pen, which features a slimmer, more visible tip. This version is exclusive to the Movink 13, but Wacom says the tablet also supports “multiple pen technologies,” allowing it to work with Wacom’s Pro Pen 2 or third-party offerings from Dr. Grip Digital, Lamy or Staedtler can work.
That’s it for the free accessories, though – users who prefer to work at an angle will have to purchase a separate (and equally slim) foldable stand for $80. There are also only two customizable buttons built into the tablet, one on each side, which can be used to turn touch functions on and off, for example. If you need more, you’ll either have to buy Wacom’s separate $99 ExpressKey remote or create some on-screen shortcuts.
With Wacom being the first drawing tablet maker to offer an OLED-based offering, the biggest competitor to the Movink 13 will likely be Apple’s long-awaited OLED iPad Pro, which is expected to be unveiled on May 7th. The most notable difference between the products is that the Wacom tablet needs to be connected to an external device, but at $750 (which is surprisingly cheap for Wacom), it’s potentially significantly cheaper than Apple’s all-in-one offering .
Unless users are locked into using desktop creative software, deciding between them would only become more difficult if Apple were to announce a native way to use the iPad as a drawing tablet on the Mac. A girl can only dream.