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Transform a Regular LCD Into a Touchscreen
eZtaR writes "NAVisis is introducing a new USB gadget (for Windows only including Vista) called LaptopTablet. You mount it onto the side of your regular LCD monitor to transform it into a fully functional touchscreen, controlled with an included pen. The gadget is priced at around $100 and seems a good alternative for Photoshoppers."
The touch screens and active stylus input displays have a thick glass or plexiglass or other durable substance to protect the screen, but every LCD (laptop or desktop) I've ever set up has a warning about not touching the screen in w/ the setup / operating instructions.
My boss and several co-workers regularly touch the LCDs here in the office, making the surface bend and distorting the image and it makes me wince everytime.
William
(who is looking forward to _all_ LCDs coming w/ some sort of digitizer built-in after manufacturers decide the added durability and lessened expense of one manufacturing line instead of two makes economic sense)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Needs a pen, that sucks. I prefer real touchscreens where you simply touch them like the ELO.
as for photoshoppers, doodling on a monitor sucks. Using a pen tablet on the desk is far easier and way more intuitive as well as not having your hand and pen device in the way blocking your view.
This is a neat device, but for the price you can get kits from ebay to add a real touchscreen layer to your lcd or laptop instead of something that requires a special pen.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
A serious graphic artist probably wants a CRT for accurate colour, gamma, etc. And at least an A4 Wacom if they prefer drawing, but on a horizontal rather than vertical surface.
Most pros I know use a Wacom in Photoshop or Illustrator, but mostly they're mouse people.
I can't imagine that a serious Photoshopper would want to use an LCD screen and draw on it with a stylus, it's just not accurate enough.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
His "borderline troll" is undoubtedly accurate.
Pressure sensitivity is key for most any artist, it's where the real value of the Wacom tablets lie, allowing you to control the quality of your brush strokes with pressure as you work. That's a bigger part of the tablet's advantage over the mouse than the actual "pen" method of input for many artists. This makes no mention of any kind of pressure sensitivity. Clearly, it can't make the screen pressure sensitive. Perhaps they could build a sensor into the pen that measures pressure and use the edge device for position, but that doesn't look like it's what they did, their pen looks like a "dumb" device, not a wireless pressure sensor. Even if it did have a pressure sensor in the tip, it's going to have to be so sensitive that it requires a really light touch, or else you're going to mar your screen, and that would greatly diminish its value.
As far as resolution is concerned: they say "sampling" is at "about" 400 DPI (whatever that means), but then it says "recognized resolution 0.2mm" which is about 125 dpi. The Wacom tablets artists work with recognize a resolution of about 5,000 lines per inch.
I'm sure you can draw a cartoony sketch with it just fine, but there's no way this device as it stands now is going to replace tablets for professional artists. That doesn't mean it's worthless. A lot of thing you want to do with touch sensitive displays isn't professional art. These could be a much cheaper alternative for touch-sensitive user interfaces and games and such. Maybe in future generations they will add some sort of pressure sensitivity through the pen and increase the resolution by an order of magnitude. Until then, the "borderline troll" is correct.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?