Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Surface Studio discussion
- Thread starter Macmamamac
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Well that is the picture Microsoft's marketing department wants me to see, but how many of each type of those users will prefer to use a Surface Pro as their primary machine for that kind of work versus a more traditional AIO or laptop/PC plus external.
There is a reason Microsoft does not announce how many Surface units they sell - and it's not because they are selling too many to count.
Admittedly I have only seen it in pictures but the base to me just seems clunky and like it's trying too hard. The design tries to project sophistication but it's missing something. In terms of the touch drawing function I think the appeal is limited to a small group of people.
Well that is the picture Microsoft's marketing department wants me to see, but how many of each type of those users will prefer to use a Surface Pro as their primary machine for that kind of work versus a more traditional AIO or laptop/PC plus external.
There is a reason Microsoft does not announce how many Surface units they sell - and it's not because they are selling too many to count.
Surface Studio is basically a humongous Surface Pro.
Microsoft didn't intend for the Surface to win over Wacom loyalists.
Has Microsoft ever compare a Surface device to a Wacom device? Never.
Microsoft's intend is to win over other creative professionals.
Microsoft's Surface division is making around a billion dollars each quarter which is pretty decent considering all the other Surface clones out there.
[doublepost=1482371533][/doublepost]
Creative professionals might be "a small group of people", but I am sure selling to that group is quite a profitable niche.
How many times do I have to explain this?
Surface has wider appeal than Wacom.
Look at the videos above that I posted.
Some people make opinions without understanding the professional construction industry for starters. Never once seen a wacom screen in an architects office / construction managers office but I am pretty sure you will see the studio popping up in them very soon.
I am a user who has been using a cintiq fir that last years almost on a daily basis.
And I can tell you that as much as Wacom makes really solid products , some of their archaic design doesn't make sense unless the technology involved needs such features.
Their cable management has always been a pain and I longed for versions that didn't require one, or at the most make it a max of two cables, one for power and one for connecting to the system.
Their desktop cintiq line is very heavy and cumbersome ( the larger 22' + sizes ) and for a while the colour fidelity in their cintiq lineup was sub par and well nigh useless for Color critical tasks. This though has now
been addressed ( I can only vouch for the 27qHD touch since it is the only one I am using at present from their current lineup. )
The cost is just insane for such tech since for a while they enjoyed a monopoly ( my new cintiq costs as much as a nMP ). As much as I love their products and use it almost daily, I always felt the price to performance ratio was skewed.
I had wished for more players in this market and I am happy to see MS and Apple offering some options ( the iPad Pro is just solid)
Having an entire system available for less than the price of a cintiq is great.
This is their first iteration and I hope MS continues to innovate on this front.
If apple has a similar offering for their iMac lineup, I will be first in line.
And I can tell you that as much as Wacom makes really solid products , some of their archaic design doesn't make sense unless the technology involved needs such features.
Their cable management has always been a pain and I longed for versions that didn't require one, or at the most make it a max of two cables, one for power and one for connecting to the system.
Their desktop cintiq line is very heavy and cumbersome ( the larger 22' + sizes ) and for a while the colour fidelity in their cintiq lineup was sub par and well nigh useless for Color critical tasks. This though has now
been addressed ( I can only vouch for the 27qHD touch since it is the only one I am using at present from their current lineup. )
The cost is just insane for such tech since for a while they enjoyed a monopoly ( my new cintiq costs as much as a nMP ). As much as I love their products and use it almost daily, I always felt the price to performance ratio was skewed.
I had wished for more players in this market and I am happy to see MS and Apple offering some options ( the iPad Pro is just solid)
Having an entire system available for less than the price of a cintiq is great.
This is their first iteration and I hope MS continues to innovate on this front.
If apple has a similar offering for their iMac lineup, I will be first in line.
Last edited:
This sums it up. The surface is a laptop replacement with pretty darn good drawing abilities. A do everything windows machine.
The wacom studio pro and cintiq are the best drawing tablets out there.
The surface studio is definitely turning heads of artists. Granted, that may not be a lot of people, but for some, the studio is what they always wanted. A great review by the artist at Penny Arcade says they basically made his dream art machine. They live out near MS headquarters and they test some of the surface products with him. I'm jealous. He had the studio for months before the announcement.
I am absolutely OK with all of these products existing. I'm glad they do. When big companies fight for niche markets, the niche customers win!
[doublepost=1482422642][/doublepost]
IIRC, the early surface tablets had Wacom digitizers in them. Didn't the first gen have a battery free stylus?
Last edited:
Microsoft's intention isn't to compete with Wacom.
What Microsoft is trying to do with the Surface and esp. the Surface Studio is to win over creative professionals who aren't traditional Wacom customers.
And while Microsoft will continue to improve its N-Trig pen technology, it's probably not going to outright beat Wacom's: it wasn't meant to be
...but it doesn't matter. Does an architect, a photographer, or a composer need, for example, 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity? Probably not.
The biggest problem with the surface studio is the almost non upgradability. It's basically an enormous Surfacebook aimes at professionals that don't want to spend 2.500 bucks on a cintiq plus a powerful pc to take full advantage of the capabilities.
Personally I'd rather buy a full specced Surface Book and use the rest of the money for a gtx80 and N.me Samsung disk then spending over 4.000 bucks on this thing.
But for creative professionals who want a one fits all device this is it and just like the even bigger 80 inch Surface it will make MS a lot of money because this market is small but extremely wealthy. I highly doubt Pixar and Company care about a few thousand bucks
Personally I'd rather buy a full specced Surface Book and use the rest of the money for a gtx80 and N.me Samsung disk then spending over 4.000 bucks on this thing.
But for creative professionals who want a one fits all device this is it and just like the even bigger 80 inch Surface it will make MS a lot of money because this market is small but extremely wealthy. I highly doubt Pixar and Company care about a few thousand bucks
I think you mean "NVMe" instead of "N.me"
The Surface Studio does have a NVMe SSD from Toshiba.
The storage is upgradable. You can throw in a Samsung 960 Pro if you want.
You are stuck with whatever graphic card it comes with though.
Last edited:
Thank you but I'm not talking about the storage in an exclusive fashion. This is a desktop and one of the cool things is that you can upgrade them whenever you want.
The Studio is a custom built so getting a new mainboard, better, power supply won't be easy.
If that's not their intention, they have a funny way of showing it. They have multiple products that compete directly with Wacom's product lines. The surface studio competes with the cintiq, the surface pro and surface book compete with mobile studio. nTrig still even makes a stand alone cintiq competitor, IIRC.
Sure, some people who don't buy wacom tablets will surely buy surface products. Because those are the only laptops MS offers. But plenty of artists already moved to surface because wacom was too expensive and/or not portable enough. I think MS is going after the people you describe, AND full time artists (surface studio and surface book are compelling options to many of the full time animators and artists I know, and I know quite a few)
Price and portability are two very powerful factors to challenge Wacom. MS has them beat in those areas.
I have faith in MS's giant wallet. nTrig was a pretty small company before they got bought by MS. Now they should have the money and motivation to compete.
Artists probably don't either! I made do with 256 and 512 with early wacom models back in the day. I'm still using an older intuos that only has 1024.
According to this artist who has been using a surface for the past 2 years, he can't really tell the difference once the software is calibrated correctly.
His ultimate conclusion: the Wacom is better in many categories: it's a better drawing experience with its built in hardware buttons, but the Surface Pro is just so much more desirable for people who need portability and have budget limits. His ideal "If I was rich" scenario would be to have a Surface studio for home, and a surface pro for travel.
Just think if Apple was competing here (like really competing, as in they had the iPad "pro" running Mac OS). I'd simply buy what Apple had and not worry about other products. Ugh, Apple frustrates me at every turn.
Last edited:
I don't think you understand what I said.
Wacom sells to a very specific market.
Microsoft's intention is not to compete in the exact same market and win over as many of Wacom's customers as possible.
Rather, Microsoft's intention is to expand the market and sell to other creative professionals that are not traditional Wacom's customer.
Is Microsoft winning over some Wacom's owner? Sure.
And of cause, Microsoft will continue to invest in and improve its N-Trig pen technology.
N-Trig's pen technology may or may not ever be as good as Wacom's, but at some point the technology will become so good that the difference does not matter.
Unfortunately, Apple hasn't exactly spend much effort to improve the Mac in any significant way.
Last edited:
Sure I do! You originally said "Microsoft's intention isn't to compete with Wacom."
Let's call Wacom's market "A", and MS's market "B".
Wacom's traditional customers are artists. I don't think you can convince me that MS isn't gunning for them with some of their announcements this year. They are very publicly beta testing hardware with artists who traditionally use cintiqs.
I think most people can see where MS and Wacom are now competing. I mean dang, all of the animator communities are talking about this stuff.
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/microsofts-gorgeous-surface-studio-might-cintiq-killer-144096.html
In circle A there is the Wacom Intuos and bamboo tablets. MS has no competing products there.
At the overlap sits the Surface Studio & the Cintiq. Two very niche, very expensive products aimed at art professionals that accomplish the same task.
Also in the overlap sits the Surface Pro line - portable computers with built in digitizers with multitouch and pen support. The Surface Pro is cheaper alternative to the Wacom Mobile Studio Pro.
In circle B sits everything else MS does: Xbox, windows, Office.
Sure I do! You originally said "Microsoft's intention isn't to compete with Wacom."
Let's call Wacom's market "A", and MS's market "B".
Wacom's traditional customers are artists. I don't think you can convince me that MS isn't gunning for them with some of their announcements this year. They are very publicly beta testing hardware with artists who traditionally use cintiqs.
I think most people can see where MS and Wacom are now competing. I mean dang, all of the animator communities are talking about this stuff.
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/microsofts-gorgeous-surface-studio-might-cintiq-killer-144096.html
![bean-soup-and-venn-diagrams-i-add-a-few-seeds-large-peanuts-pods-TNincm-clipart.jpg]()
In circle A there is the Wacom Intuos and bamboo tablets. MS has no competing products there.
At the overlap sits the Surface Studio & the Cintiq. Two very niche, very expensive products aimed at art professionals that accomplish the same task.
Also in the overlap sits the Surface Pro line - portable computers with built in digitizers with multitouch and pen support. The Surface Pro is cheaper alternative to the Wacom Mobile Studio Pro.
In circle B sits everything else MS does: Xbox, windows, Office.
Just to be clear, who do you mean when you said "artists"?
illustrators? animators? photographers? architects? music composers? etc.
Do you mean specifically people who draw? That would be the first two.
Last edited:
[doublepost=1483290028][/doublepost]"I could make a thinner one."
[doublepost=1483291676][/doublepost]
You and others here appear to want a definitive answer as to what is "best". In reality, nothing is perfect. I own a Wacom Cintiq desktop, a portable Cintiq Companion, and several Wacom Intuos Tablets. They are really good, but I also own a Surface Pro 4 and it is also very good. Better in some ways than Wacom, and not as good in some other ways. But in the end, they are all very satisfying and fun to use. When it's time to actually use them, I am totally indifferent to the specs.
Nobody can tell the difference between a pen that detects 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity and 4098 levels, so the nTrig pen just needs to be good enough. As it turns out in actual use, the nTrig pen is quite good.
[doublepost=1483292060][/doublepost]
It may be missing something, but it appears to have more than anyone else is offering at this moment.
[doublepost=1483293016][/doublepost]
I don't see why some people are so negative about Microsoft's decision to make this, and so bothered that others are excited by it.
30,000 sold and they've ordered another 30,000 to be made for 1st Quarter 2017.
Maybe. Those figures are from third-party sources as Microsoft themselves have said they will not release actual Surface Studio sales.
I'll agree about the sensitivity. Past 1024 I can't tell the difference. Some might be able to but I cannot. If you notice in my post I'm gushing about the screen/digitizer.
You may not notice pressure sensitivity, but I'd wager you'd notice the two areas I was gushing about. Where I'll continue to praise Wacom and wait on Microsoft/ntrig is the accuracy and lag. Mobile studios digitizer is better than the surface based on the time I've spent with them, and based on other reviewers impressions they would agree.
I'd say you would notice a difference in lag coming from an older cintiq generation. It's especiallly noticeable because of the visible cursor. You would also notice the improved parallax (which is where the iPad Pro initially caught my attention).
The other thing you might notice is improved accuracy at the edges versus older cintiq models.
My favorite is the Apple Pencil, partially because the lag is low, but I have to admit that seeing the cursor before you press is super, super handy. But dang do I love the tip of the Apple Pencil. It just feels good to me.
Last edited:
I own all the Wacom devices you are talking about and the SP4. There is very little difference in lag between them and the Surface line. Not enough difference. The parallax is actually better on the Surface than Wacom. What I'm saying is, you'll have fine results with either Wacom or Surface. No point in putting down either one.
Which device are you using right now?
Wacom has some quirks too, but you are probably used to it.
No, I mean, which pen tablet are you using right now?
Obviously, I don't mean this very second.
Last edited: