iirc there is/was a wacom ballpoint pen-based stylus so you can put paper on the tablet and draw+digitize.

They did the 'inkling' but it wasn't generally well received: a bit inaccurate and more for fun than a professional product. I suppose the fact that they've abandoned it is significant. 

Actually, since yesterday I've read a couple of early reviews of the Iskn Slate 2 and it looks disappointing too. No pressure sensitivity, translating speed of movement into line thickness (work hard to produce a product that feels natural to use and then deliberately build in an artificial and unnatural effect??) hit and miss response etc. etc. Worst of all, a couple of reviewers included photos of drawings compared to what the slate 2 captured. Not impressed.

New business idea:

Buy second hand intuos 4 tablets for around £80

Sell the pens on ebay for £75
Sell the tablets sans pen for £35
???
Profit!

I know it always used to be the case that going off-brand on tablets was basically a waste of money, but I've been seeing lots of reviews of the Huion range of tablets that are very positive. Main gripes are:

Pen requires a battery (believe wacom have a patent on the wireless power for pen bit)
Surfaces are very smooth/slick when compared to the more paper-y texture of the Wacoms
Drivers can be fiddly to install, and not as customisable as the wacom ones.

Anyone used one? It's very tempting, when a large format one (10" x 6.25") new is about the same as an intuos pen small.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Huion-H610Pro-5080-LPI-10x6-25-Professional-Art-Graphics-Drawing-Tablet-/332020803090?hash=item4d4dfb6612:g:gQMAAOSwZ1BXemoT

Do they work on linux?

It seems so - https://digimend.github.io/tablets/

Yes, with better support than Windows it seems. Plug and play pretty much.

Do those question marks even need to be there?

I was wondering about pressure sensitivity when watching the vid - that's something that's never going to be captured properly, also the 'grain' within a pencil line. Drawing with a real pencil doesn't give a line that's solid, it's broken and fractured because of the nature of the graphite in it, again that's something that's never going to be captured, only simulated. :C

Have you got a link to the review and photos you mentioned?

Yeah, they're the mysterious, unknown method for getting round PayPal and eBay fees, those pesky things that turn a decent markup into not worth the hassle :(

Ah yeah, I've not sold anything on eBay for sometime, and was forgetting about that.

Didn't you or Ant work out the profit margins on selling stuff on eBay a while back, as if you were a business?

A couple of the reviews:

http://simonmarksmith.com/wordpress/uncategorized/not-slating-the-slate-is-this-the-best-drawing-and-note-taking-tablet-for-the-ipad/

http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/10/27/13434636/iskn-slate-review-digitize-paper-drawings-magnetic-ring

There are several if you just search on 'iskn slate review' or similar. 

I did, don't recall if I posted it here though. It's shocking how much they take really. A 10 quid market, for instance, works out at about 2 quid profit.

Same as Kos, don't know if I've posted it but I've had a tentative look. I've been tempted for a long time to bring in a couple of hundred pounds worth of something in bulk from China to sell on eBay. Things like arduino relays and other small components.

Never did the maths properly to figure out how many and how cheap I'd need to get them for to make it worthwhile. Especially when you look at the market prices, cost of postage, ebay fees, PayPal fees, potential for people to be dicks and say they've not turned up or they are broken.

Well I got paid for some work today, so I just ordered the Huion h610 pro for 45 quid. If it's awful I'll punt it back on ebay and get a wacom pen and touch (quite like the idea of touch sensor for zoom and stuff, but don't know if I'd actually use it).

So my Huion H610 Pro arrived yesterday. Got to say that I'm very impressed so far, it's years ahead of the old Bamboo that I used to have. Not sure it's got the right feel for sketching directly, but certainly it's good enough for colouring.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/332141d4zepjfpk/seated%20nude.jpg?dl=0

> Not sure it's got the right feel for sketching directly, but certainly it's good enough for colouring.

Can you elaborate on that? Are you saying it's more like a felt tip than a pencil/biro, or something else?

It's not really like any of them.

I've disabled the buttons on the pen as I couldn't really workout how to hold it comfortably and not accidentally press them. I tend to rotate the pen as I draw, so even starting off in a good position doesn't last long. Also I instinctively want to hold it in a writing position, but for sketching I'd normally hold a pencil in a variety of ways depending on the stroke and control required (NJ), which feels a bit silly with this and not really comfortable or intuitive either.

The feel of the pen on the surface is hard to describe. It lacks the bite that a real pencil has on paper. I think there's less tactile feedback. I experimented with putting a piece of paper over the surface which does improve things, but I suspect the (replaceable) nib would wear out far too quickly with that on.

The disconnect between drawing on a board and seeing the results on a screen is something I think I'll.get used to, though. Going to experiment with a reduced active area tomorrow and see if that improves the feel and drawing position. With the whole area active I find I'm reluctant to move my hand as much as I would on paper and end up drawing in a really uncomfortable position, which also leads to bad results as lines go awry.

Yeah I found tablets, even bigish ones really cramped my drawing style. Way better than mouse, but not really satisfactory in any way that encouraged me try to improve with practice. OTOH I found a tablet, even a 4x5" model excelled for using the pen tool in photoshop, and similar bezier drawing and curves manipulation in 3d animation software.

Going to try it in mud box later, and it's great for tracing scans to vectors in inkscape.