Huion H610 Pro Art Graphics Drawing Tablet

5.0 out of 5 stars Great inexpensive, high quality graphics tablet
By Keith on December 28, 2015

My initial reaction:
I love it. It was easy to set up and it's a real joy to use. Drawing is effortless and the pressure levels allow me to get really light, thin lines and press harder for dark, thicker strokes. It feels pretty natural to draw with it. I can draw very light gesture drawings and start to press a bit harder to clean up the lines as the sketch comes into focus - like you might do with a pencil.

How I selected this tablet:
First, some quick background: I'm a professional graphic designer. As an artist I do pen and ink drawings and paintings - mostly for my own enjoyment - but I do intend to get more into commercial illustration as well.

My requirements were for a mid to pro level graphics tablet. I wanted a bigger drawing surface and good pressure levels. I didn't care about touch capability or a bunch of preset keys - I prefer simplicity and I'd never bother programming all of them anyway.

I've owned a few of the entry level Wacom tablets over the years. I've mostly used those Wacom tablets with Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter (Then made by Fractal Design). So it's been a while since I've used a graphics tablet and I didn't really keep up on the technology.

I was very very close to getting the Wacom Intuos Pro medium this time - and I have no doubt I'd like it - but the price tag stung a good bit. So, I read a lot of reviews and watched a ton of YouTube demos of the various offerings from Huion, Monoprice, Ugee and Turcom - brands I'd never heard of before. Which just left me thoroughly confused as to the differences between them, so I kept thinking, "just get the Wacom". I suspect a lot of people go through a similar decision process when trying to choose between inexpensive tablets and the Wacom models. I needed something good and reliable. This gets further confusing because it seems like some of these brands share the same internal technology anyway. And all the reviews are pretty mixed.

Alright. So, I weighed a lot of pros and cons from a lot of reviewers and finally settled on Huion. My thinking was that most people, if they had problems, it seemed to be some kind of driver conflict or problem with installation. I've dealt with that many times for peripherals and am pretty computer savvy, so I wasn't very worried by that. Worst case, I could always return it, and most people speak well of their experience with Huion's support. Plus, I watched a very long demo of an artist drawing with it and I liked what I saw.

Nearest I can tell, the Wacom Intuos Pro medium model I looked at just has one or two features up on the Huion H610 Pro - one being the ability to detect stylus tilt so you can draw with the edge as well as the tip - a cool feature for sure, but that can be achieved other ways - like by using a chisel tip brush or stylus pressure. Not a deal-breaker considering the vast difference in price (Please feel free to comment and add to that comparison to further help others looking at the two models).

And now my initial experience unboxing, setting up and using the Huion H610 Pro:

Unboxing:
My first impression of the packaging is it's actually pretty stylish (not that it much matters) and well-packed.
The tablet itself is pretty big - a good size drawing surface area. It's pretty solid and a thin profile. The buttons are also pretty solid. Nothing feels cheap or creaky. The stylus is light and feels good in the hand. There's two programmable buttons on the stylus. At the moment I have one set to right mouse click (for contextual menu) and the other for undo last action (command-z on Mac).

The buttons on the tablet are for common functions like undo, switch to eraser, switch to brush, zoom in/out and a few others. I haven't used them much, but they do come in handy being right there.

Installation/Set-up:
I have a mid-2012 Apple MacBook Pro running OS X El Capitan (10.11.2 - the latest at the time of this review). I don't really use any other peripherals - just basic Logitech mouse. They say it's good to disable any peripheral drivers that may interfere during installation, but I didn't having anything like that.

I've pretty much learnt to ignore any driver software disk included with computer peripherals these days (they usually get outdated while sitting on a store shelf) and instead just go to the Support section of the manufacturer's website for the latest drivers. So I went to https://www.huiontablet.com/support/ and found the latest driver and manual for my model and downloaded them. Installation went fine. I found I didn't really need to tweak any of the default settings. The default sensitivity setting was fine for me, but I appreciate being able to adjust it.

Using the Huion H610 Pro:
There's lots of great free/inexpensive art software out there these days - here's some recommendations:
Both ArtRage and Mischief are great for drawing and natural media. I like ArtRage because of how it mimics real-world painting techniques (similar to Corel Painter), but Mischief's minimalist interface stays out of your way and is great for sketching endless ideas. Some people have good luck with Krita, which looks promising - and may work real well on Linux and Windows, but was way too jittery on my Mac - I'm sure that'll improve over time though, and I'll revisit it. Naturally, Autodesk SketchBook and Corel Painter are always nice to have if you want even more professional features.

I've used the Huion H610 Pro with all of the software listed above. As mentioned, Krita didn't work well, but it wasn't the tablet's fault. Krita's just a bit buggy yet on the Mac (I believe Krita is fine on Windows though). The rest of the software works terrific. No complaints at all. Drawing in ArtRage, Mischief, SketchBook and Photoshop is a joy. Of course, photo editing in Photoshop also works great.

At first I was being really careful using the tablet - thinking maybe it was fragile or something (not sure why) - but once I warmed up to it and started forgetting I was drawing digitally, I really started sketching like I would on paper and got into it. I was most impressed at how responsive the stylus is. I can draw really light and just press a slight bit harder and get these wonderful variable width lines.

Ultimately, I highly recommend this tablet. It's a really great value.

Images in this review

Customer image