Wacom delivers with the new Bamboo Line

Wow! That’s the first word that came out of my mouth with the unboxing of the latest Wacom Tablet products under the new Bamboo Line. Not only does Wacom deliver with a tested and strong product but also with packaging that gives the user the feeling they are opening up a long cherished gift handed down through the generations or something you would find on the bed of a 5 star resort.

An opening of the box will present the user of the Bamboo Fun with a welcome that states “This is your Bamboo, Use it to get more out of your computer. Let us know how it goes. “It is signed by Dennis Hoff, Wacom Consumer product manager. The Bamboo and the Bamboo fun both offer 4 programmable buttons that Wacom identifies as ExpressKeys to set up as Undo, Copy or a wide range of the commands most frequently used. A Ring in the center of these keys can be used for Zooming in and out of projects. The Bamboo and the Bamboo Fun work with both Mac and PC and supports Win2000 – Vista on the PC Side and Mac OS X on the Mac Side.

We opened up the Bamboo Fun Medium size unit in Silver. The Active Area for the screen is 8.5’Wide and 5.3″ from top to bottom. Wacom has two different sizes for the Bamboo Fun, Small and Medium. The Small size Bamboo Fun features an active area of 5.8″W x 3.7D. There are 512 levels of pressure sensitivity with the Bamboo Fun and the resolution is 2540LPI. The colors available are black, silver, white and blue.

The Bamboo Fun ships with the tablet, USB cable, a Bamboo Fun Mouse and Bamboo Fun Pen. Both the mouse and the pen use Wacom’s Patented No batteries, Wireless technology. The stylish looks of the tablet itself spill over to both the mouse and the pen holder which can be displayed nicely on the desktop. Software on DVD also ships with the Bamboo Fun to get you up and running with Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Win/4.0 Mac, Corel Painter Essentials 3.0 and Nik Color Efex Pro 2.0 GE. we love the feel of the Bamboo Fun unit, it is in line with the other Wacom products we have looked at including the Intuos 3 which offers more in detail and fine desktop graphics work. Users for this will still enjoy the ability to Edit, Paint, Draw, Handwrite and be up and running in no time. More information can be found at http://www.wacom.com/

The other product we took a glance at is the Wacom Bamboo Small Unit with an active area of 5.8″ x 3.7D. This unit is available only in Black however also features the 4 ExpressKeys and Zoom in/out ring. This unit is more designed for the user that will work this into handwriting type of features which are a part of Windows Vista or with the Mac Inkwell program. The tablet and included pen will work with Windows 2000 as well as XP and Vista as well as the Mac OS X 10.3.9. The Software bundle that ships with the Bamboo Fun is not available with this unit however with the recent release of the Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 it is certainly worth getting that program to work with the tablet. The Bamboo unit has an SRP of $99 while the Bamboo Fun in the Small size retails for $99 and the medium for $199. You can find the Wacom Bamboo products at most computer retailers. We found the Bamboo at CompUSA in the Mac Section.