The Cintiq Pro 27’s screen was a little dimmer than I expected which resulted in colors appearing to be a bit muted, but the display still has incredibly great resolution and color accuracy. The grip and control buttons on the sides are pretty useful — if for nothing else other than repositioning the screen — and the Pro Pen 3, while not the most impressive looking, was incredibly accurate and handled exceptionally well, especially since the nib didn’t have the trademark “wobble” that’s present in nearly every other pen on the market. Finally, the entire surface supports multi-touch, so you can leverage the entire screen as a touchpad for hand gestures for additional workflow enhancements should you desire. Wacom doesn't project any rated coverage claims for sRGB, but designers working with purely web-based art will be pleased with its 100% sRGB coverage (see below).

The touch controls are slightly less customizable—some are set in stone simply because they make intuitive sense (like pinch and expand to zoom); others, like various multi-finger taps, can be assigned to different tasks. The app includes a guide to every gesture, as well as advanced gestures for specialized actions. As previously mentioned, the touch controls can also be turned off. The screen supports multi-touch gestures for up to 10 fingers. Touch functionality is a necessity for several types of digital design, and thus, it’s here to stay—despite the grumblings of some who don't need it. If you have the patience to add another dimension of control to your workflow, you might find it speeds you up instead of slowing you down, and that unintentional touches happen less and less often with practice. Arguably placing it along the side of your dominant hand shouldn’t be an issue as you won’t be using that hand to access the buttons behind the grip anyway since it will be occupied holding the pen, but since I was planning on messing with positions a lot while using the device, I opted to leave the mount on the top left side of the screen. The Wacom Intuos Pro is a graphics tablet rather than a pen display, meaning you’ll need to hook it up to some kind of external display like a tablet or monitor. Once this is done – and the setup process is pretty intuitive and straightforward – you’ve got a highly effective drawing tablet on your hands, and one that comes at a great price. Like the Apple Pencil for iPads, the Pro Pen 3 can be customized—its three buttons can host a far wider range of commands than the Pencil’s double-tap, however, which is fairly limited in scope. The display will begin to recognize the stylus at about 5mm away from the screen’s surface, so any shortcuts you program on the buttons will only work from that distance as well. This is notable for those who are transitioning from a keyboard-and-mouse setup. If you assign a keyboard shortcut (Command+Z for undo, say) to a Pro Pen 3 button, it might take a minute to get used to the fact that the Pro Pen 3’s “undo” will work only when your pen is very close to the screen. For some, this will take a bit of time to become second nature—or, you could assign functions to the stylus buttons that, typically, would only be handled by a mouse, and save keyboard shortcuts for the Express Keys on the display itself. For me, this proved the fastest way to work, at least in the early phases of testing. The possibilities for setting up a hyper-efficient workspace in the Wacom Center app seem pretty wide open, as we’ll discuss next.

Wacom Cintiq Pro 27: The Display/Tablet

Design-wise I get it, and with a larger workspace it really isn’t an issue, but if space is limited it is an annoyance. The Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 is All I Want to Use Now

Despite all of the well-designed compartments for the spare parts and positioning of the cradle, compared to the pen, it feels somewhat cheap. Especially when you factor in the cost of everything with the quality build of nearly every other single feature, the cradle could use some extra love, even if it works just fine as is. It just feels like an afterthought. Wacom Cintiq Pro 27: Pen Pressure and In-Use You can also customize the Express Keys to control a variety of actions—each button can essentially access the same range of Actions, and the Express Key panels house four buttons each. I found myself programming keyboard modifiers here and speeding up my workflows quite a bit—much of what I need to do in the Adobe suite begins with the Option or Command key. On its own, the Cintiq Pro 27 weighs a healthy 15.9 pounds, but that stat is not terribly useful—the stand, at 23.6 by 14.1 by 12.6 inches, weighs another 19.8 pounds, so the total weight of the system is nearly 36 pounds. Unless you have a VESA mount you plan to use instead of the stand, you’ll be adding some substantial weight to whatever flat surface you place this on.The Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 is probably the most accurate and responsive tablet I’ve tested in the last few years. The system has a whole set of customization tools available to adjust the pen sensitivity, angle, tilt, and more through the Wacom Center app that even allows you to draw on a “blank surface” while testing out all of the various settings. Pressure sensitivity for the Wacom Pro Pen 3 is very much on the higher end at 8,192 levels, which is great for anyone who expects to work with more specific details in their design. Of course, some softwares you might use will have different level caps, so it isn’t necessarily guaranteed that you’ll always be working with the pen’s peak sensitivity. Naturally, as a multi-touch display, the Cintiq Pro 27 is very responsive when using either the pen or your fingers to work on designs. At times, these levels of sensitivity can actually be a frustration when in use – if you’re drawing with the pen while multi-touch is enabled, for example, it’s not uncommon to start a pen stroke and then have it evaporate because you’ve accidentally grazed the display with your finger. Like most other modern tablets, the Cintiq Pro 27 Pro Pen 3 can recognize the degree of tilt and pressure up to 8,192 levels using Wacom’s Electro-Magnetic Resonance technology. Messing with it by drawing (poorly as you’ll see below) some lines and shapes and testing pressure levels, speed and angles, the pen was perfectly responsive and accurate. The Cintiq Pro 27 showed good brightness at 344 nits, and its 991:1 contrast ratio effectively matched its 1,000:1 rating by Wacom.

At its size, however, the Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 can be uncomfortable to sit close to for longer lengths of time. This is an issue to be aware of, as creating and drawing with any pen display will almost always involve you having to sit as close as possible to its screen. Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 review: performance As mentioned, the Cintiq does support touch but I could take or leave them. For the most part, I left them. After some initial testing of the touch capabilities, which do work, I never felt there was a scenario where using them instead of the programmable buttons or my nearby keyboard was a better option. Effectively, these improvements to the Cintiq make it more than just a tablet, but an actual reference monitor too, giving users the functionality of what has typically required two separate devices in one. However, we did find that not all of the Cintiq Pro 27’s gestures would translate to every program. This isn’t necessarily a problem that can be blamed on the display itself, but it’s something to be aware of when preparing to work with it. The company says the screen features no parallax or latency and in my testing, I can pretty much confirm this to be accurate. The feeling of the pen-to-screen was incredibly smooth and natural and after a week of long days of testing, there were barely even any fingerprint smudges on the screen, which tells me it combats the side effects of daily use very well. Wacom Cintiq Pro 27: The Pen

One Massive, Excellent Stand (a $500 Option)

The Apple Pencil may seem hyper-futuristic as it charges via induction while it rests on the edge of an iPad display magnetically, but consider this: The Pro Pen 3 has no battery or cord, and it requires no charging at all. It uses Electromagnetic Resonance (EMR)—a technology Wacom developed in the 1980s—to work with the screen, as pen pressure and button presses are converted to electromagnetic waves. Furthermore, the Pro Pen 3 has a 10ms rated response time, versus the Apple Pencil’s 20ms. This, paired with a 120Hz refresh rate on the screen, equates to extremely low latency. The Pro Pen 3 has 8,192 pressure levels and supports 60 degrees of pen tilt angle. The cabinet has built-in cable management cinches, and some Velcro cable-management ties are also included. According to Wacom, the system ships with a USB-C-to-USB-C cable (5.9 feet), a USB-C-to-USB-A cable (5.9 feet), an HDMI cable (5.9 feet), and a mini DisplayPort-to-DisplayPort cable. (Our review unit came with only the cables necessary for the iMac we tested the display with.)

For instance, the touch features are the one time I felt the Cintiq Pro 27 was a bit laggy and unlike using the pen and keyboard, I couldn’t pan and zoom at the same time when using touch controls. So while there is usefulness to the touch features, I think this is an area where Wacom still has some room to improve and could take some notes from the functionality and performance of something like an Apple iPad Pro.The new big daddy of the Wacom range, announced in September 2022, the Cintiq Pro 27 boasts a majorly upgraded display – a true 10-bit 4K reference-quality unit, on par with a premium monitor. It’s the biggest tablet in the current family, with a 27-inch digital canvas, but despite this it actually has a smaller physical footprint than the previous Cintiq Pro 24, thanks to significantly slimmed bezels and a generally sleeker design. The premium Pro Pen 2, supplied with the tablet, is one of the best styluses around (save of course for the recent Pro Pen 3 that comes with the new Cintiq Pro tablets), and it never needs charging. With pressure and tilt sensitivity, it gives you real drawing flexibility, and the level of “bite” on the stylus is just right. In recent years there have been an impressive number of new competitors in the graphics tablet market, giving a constantly growing list of alternatives for you to choose from.