Help buying ipad or surface pro

[Saphire]

Hi gxhpainter, I thought long and hard last night on what to purchase, I really only considered the surface pro purely to use the full program of Artrage with no intension of using it for anything else. I have now got so used to using the simplity of ios its difficult to switch back.
I have my ipad on for most of the day switching between drawing and multytasking split screen, doing that with two seperate os systems I think would become very frustrating . Redsaucers great review was brilliant it did give me a lot to think about, I was in the store for two hours checking them both out, it wasnt an easy decision to make.

[RedSaucers]

Hi gxhpainter!,

I have got the i5 8GB one with 256GB disk, which is the mid range 2017 version.

I already own a Surface Pro 4 so my decision was partly based on what improvements the new model would offer.

1. It is fanless unlike the i7 2017 model, and my surface pro 4. This is probably not much of an issue for most people though, but at times I found the fan to be a little distracting, and when it turns on I would always wonder why!, what is it doing!

2. More disk space of 256GB, so I could hold all my art and videos locally on the disk and wouldn't have to connect an external disk.

3. 50% extra battery life. The Surface Pro 4 was pretty poor. I like to draw outside and therefore have to bump my brightness up to 100%. My surface pro 4 would last about 2 hours of using ArtRage, the new model now lasts about 3.5 hours which means that I have found I am not glancing at my battery levels all the time and can finish most of a painting on a single charge. I do have an extra battery pack though, which effectively doubles the battery life anyway if my battery runs low.

4. About 20% faster than my surface pro 4. This was not too noticeable to me unless I did a side by side comparison (which I did). I have never really had much in the way of lag anyway off ArtRage on my surface pro 4. My typical canvas size is 3000x3000 px and I only notice some lag with some of the custom brushes (which can be tweaked to reduce the amount, as discussed in this forum), which I don't typically use much of anyway. My main tools are the oil brush, sticker spray and the airbrush, with the only lag being detected on a 100% hardness of airbrush setting, which you would expect on any system, and again this is a setting that I rarely use or only with a small brush.

Overall on a typical painting I don't notice any lag when using ArtRage on the Surface Pro 2017 and can get fully absorbed into a painting without becoming frustrated at the response of the software. I have trialled many other art programs on the surface and ArtRage stands head and shoulders above them all due to its speed, flexibility and intuitive user interface, which seems to be geared to a touch device!. I have found I now don't need a keyboard or hard key touch device to access shortcuts now.

When I am painting I have just mapped the volume down and volume up buttons on the top of the device to the Shift and Alt keys. This means I can resize my brush, move the canvas and colour pick with my left hand rested on the top of the device with my right hand doing the painting. This is an ideal portable solution for me as all I need is my surface pro and my pen and then I can quickly get on with a painting.

5. Better more sensitive surface pen. I have to be honest, I was a little hoodwinked by Microsoft on this as they promised more pressure levels, a better initial activation force and tilt. All of these features are all well and good if the pen remained accurate (especially for us artists), but I found the new pen to be unuseable. Yes the initial activation force was much better, and the pressure levels were improved (although I couldn't really tell the difference) but the parallax on the screen was inconsistent, the pen line position would randomly move around and little tails appeared at the end of lines. After much investigation the Bamboo Ink and Adonit Ink fixed all these issues (probably because they don't include tilt, which I don't care about anyway) and means I have now found a pen that is almost on a par with the apple pencil and allows me to comfortably paint using ArtRage.

6. 8GB RAM. I have to say that using ArtRage my canvas size means that I don't generally get too close to using 4GB let alone 8GB so there wasn't much difference but i guess you can never have too much RAM!

Note :

There have been reports on some light bleed at the bottom of the screen. I only noticed it on my device when I looked very closely with my screen a solid colour, and when I am in a darkened room. It is at the very bottom so I don't even notice this / don't care about it as I mainly use the middle of the screen.

The screen brightness auto adjusts in possibly the most annoying way in that when the screen gets darker the brightness auto adjusts to be darker with a lighter screen becoming lighter!. Which as I like full brightness and painting outside using the ArtRage dark mode was a bit annoying. But there is a fix for this with a simple registry change to disable it.

Hope this information helps

[gxhpainter]

Hi gxhpainter!,

I have got the i5 8GB one with 256GB disk, which is the mid range 2017 version.

I already own a Surface Pro 4 so my decision was partly based on what improvements the new model would offer.

1. It is fanless unlike the i7 2017 model, and my surface pro 4. This is probably not much of an issue for most people though, but at times I found the fan to be a little distracting, and when it turns on I would always wonder why!, what is it doing!

2. More disk space of 256GB, so I could hold all my art and videos locally on the disk and wouldn't have to connect an external disk.

3. 50% extra battery life. The Surface Pro 4 was pretty poor. I like to draw outside and therefore have to bump my brightness up to 100%. My surface pro 4 would last about 2 hours of using ArtRage, the new model now lasts about 3.5 hours which means that I have found I am not glancing at my battery levels all the time and can finish most of a painting on a single charge. I do have an extra battery pack though, which effectively doubles the battery life anyway if my battery runs low.

4. About 20% faster than my surface pro 4. This was not too noticeable to me unless I did a side by side comparison (which I did). I have never really had much in the way of lag anyway off ArtRage on my surface pro 4. My typical canvas size is 3000x3000 px and I only notice some lag with some of the custom brushes (which can be tweaked to reduce the amount, as discussed in this forum), which I don't typically use much of anyway. My main tools are the oil brush, sticker spray and the airbrush, with the only lag being detected on a 100% hardness of airbrush setting, which you would expect on any system, and again this is a setting that I rarely use or only with a small brush.

Overall on a typical painting I don't notice any lag when using ArtRage on the Surface Pro 2017 and can get fully absorbed into a painting without becoming frustrated at the response of the software. I have trialled many other art programs on the surface and ArtRage stands head and shoulders above them all due to its speed, flexibility and intuitive user interface, which seems to be geared to a touch device!. I have found I now don't need a keyboard or hard key touch device to access shortcuts now.

When I am painting I have just mapped the volume down and volume up buttons on the top of the device to the Shift and Alt keys. This means I can resize my brush, move the canvas and colour pick with my left hand rested on the top of the device with my right hand doing the painting. This is an ideal portable solution for me as all I need is my surface pro and my pen and then I can quickly get on with a painting.

5. Better more sensitive surface pen. I have to be honest, I was a little hoodwinked by Microsoft on this as they promised more pressure levels, a better initial activation force and tilt. All of these features are all well and good if the pen remained accurate (especially for us artists), but I found the new pen to be unuseable. Yes the initial activation force was much better, and the pressure levels were improved (although I couldn't really tell the difference) but the parallax on the screen was inconsistent, the pen line position would randomly move around and little tails appeared at the end of lines. After much investigation the Bamboo Ink and Adonit Ink fixed all these issues (probably because they don't include tilt, which I don't care about anyway) and means I have now found a pen that is almost on a par with the apple pencil and allows me to comfortably paint using ArtRage.

6. 8GB RAM. I have to say that using ArtRage my canvas size means that I don't generally get too close to using 4GB let alone 8GB so there wasn't much difference but i guess you can never have too much RAM!

Note :

There have been reports on some light bleed at the bottom of the screen. I only noticed it on my device when I looked very closely with my screen a solid colour, and when I am in a darkened room. It is at the very bottom so I don't even notice this / don't care about it as I mainly use the middle of the screen.

The screen brightness auto adjusts in possibly the most annoying way in that when the screen gets darker the brightness auto adjusts to be darker with a lighter screen becoming lighter!. Which as I like full brightness and painting outside using the ArtRage dark mode was a bit annoying. But there is a fix for this with a simple registry change to disable it.

Hope this information helps

Thanks it sure does help! a few months ago I was at a regional art exhibition and juried show , I had 3 works juried in so I was stoked , and one of them won Best Amateur Photography since they did not actually have a category for digital art! Anyway it was a 3 day event and on the second evening they had a quick draw event where participating artists would be given 1.5 hours to paint something and people could watch and bid on the works. Most artists did oils or acrylics, some watercolors and one lady did some silk screens.. people loved the event and most works sold. I did not participate since I could not drag my big desktop system , monitor and Epson printer LOL... but I was thinking later if I used a laptop on the surface pro, and my printer an epson 3880 which is not that big I could actually do it and I think people would really like to see how a digital artist actually works and then print out the work!... so your information will help me come up with a portable art studio for next year...

[copespeak]

Hi Gary, I do demos with my iPad, which is great fun. I have an inexpensive Epson projector, screen, and just the connection from iPad to projector. Takes only a few minutes to set up.

[gxhpainter]

Hi Gary, I do demos with my iPad, which is great fun. I have an inexpensive Epson projector, screen, and just the connection from iPad to projector. Takes only a few minutes to set up.

Hi Robyn so good to hear from
you again, sounds like an interesting setup at well so everyone can see what you are doing.... I will keep it in mind.

[zhacai]

I'm a digital artist . I was looking for the XP-Pen Artist 12 Pro display drawing tablet which is 11.6 inches so it's smaller. My workspace is quite comfy and I have my couch right next to my desk so I could always take the tablet and draw while watching TV. The thing that I like about the iPad/surface pro though is that I can leave the house easily with them.
In my opnion the iPad Pro is a lot better to draw on than the surface because you get the higher refresh rate(120hz) which results in lower input lag when drawing. Also the apple pencil supports a wider range of pressure sensitivity.

[siljathomas]

New face tiles from this era have a lot of disadvantages because they are trying to implement that can’t be used as a detailed design, but I found bamboo ink and adonite ink to be better. The donut ink is smaller than the new face pencil, but I think it's the closest thing I've ever seen in my apple pen.