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Touch support

Overview

Whether touch support is available on a drawing tablet is first highly dependent on the kind of tablet.

  • Pen tablets (screenless) - only Wacom Intuos Pro tablets support touch

  • Pen displays - Wacom has supported touch for many years now, mostly in its Cintiq Pro series. Huion and XP-Pen have a few models that support touch.

How well touch works also depends strongly on the device - and on the operating system being used.

Adoption of touch in drawing tablets

Here is a list of all the tablets I know of that support touch: Tablets that support touch

The operating system is the bottleneck, not the hardware

This is the thing to understand before anything else on this page.

The touch hardware in a modern pen display is very good, and not far off what is in an iPad. What lags is the software stack it plugs into. Windows has excellent support for touch displays, far better than macOS currently - but even on Windows it will never feel exactly like an iPad, because an iPad is a device where the hardware, the operating system, and the applications were all built around touch from the start.

So if you own an iPad and you are wondering why touch on a pen display is not the same, the answer is not that the hardware is worse. The answer is that the operating system underneath it is different.

Overall satisfaction with touch

Pen tablets - the closest approximation we have to compare touch support on a pen tablet to is a laptop touchpad. In my experience using a touch-supporting pen tablet doesn't match the experience you get with a laptop touchpad. Overall I find the experience less smooth and more jerky. And I find it difficult to click.

Pen displays - my experience here is that touch support works much better, perhaps because you are touching what you see. However this is strongly dependent on the operating system that you use. I've been very satisfied with pen displays that support touch on Windows 11.

How often is touch used in drawing tablets

Again it seems that most people disable the touch support on pen tablets and pen displays.

However I do turn it on more often with the pen display than a pen tablet - but I only do this when I'm not really using the pen display as a drawing tablet but rather as a touch sensitive monitor, because sometimes it is just so useful to be able to close a window or click a button with my hand rather than picking up the pen.

Operating system support

Windows

Microsoft has been deeply integrating touch into its Windows operating system starting with the release of the first Surface device in 2012. And Microsoft has been continually improving how the operating system works with touch ever since.

For this reason using a pen display that supports touch with a Windows device will give you an experience that seems just like a Microsoft Surface device. Every gesture you were used to on a Microsoft Surface will work the same way on a touch-supporting pen display attached to a Windows device.

macOS

For macOS, many of you will have used an iPad, and so your expectations will be driven by how well touch support works with an Apple iPad.

However macOS does not have touch support built in, unlike iPadOS. So gestures that you're used to on an iPad simply don't work on macOS even if you have a touch-supporting pen display attached.

So you should keep this in mind, because you may be disappointed if you get a pen display with touch support and expect a smooth seamless experience just like you had with an iPad.

Compared to the iPad and similar devices

Devices like an Apple iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab S have excellent touch support. Their operating systems have deeply integrated touch, and because they were designed as touch-based devices in the first place, all applications on these devices natively support touch and usually very well.

These devices are typically better at palm rejection than a typical pen display or pen tablet.

Should touch be a requirement?

It is worth questioning. Making touch a hard requirement eliminates most of the good pen displays at any price, and most buyers stop using it anyway.

If you do want touch and the budget supports it, the answer is Wacom. All four of these are very high quality for touch:

Disabling touch support

All tablets that have touch allow a user to disable touch support.

  • Some tablets have a physical switch to enable and disable touch.

  • Drivers also tend to allow you to disable touch.

Palm rejection

Pen tablets - my experience with palm rejection on pen tablets has been poor. Because I place the pen tablet between me and the keyboard, my wrists and forearms tend to rest on the tablet. If touch is enabled, even though I'm only touching with my wrists and forearms, that is enough to trigger the tablet.

Pen displays - palm rejection is decent with the pen display. I think for me part of the reason is I don't rest my arms on the pen display as often, which might confuse the touch system. But it is not as good as what you would see with an Apple iPad.

Drawing gloves to help with palm rejection.

Because a drawing tablet with touch may not reject the palm as well as an iPad, consider using a drawing glove. They can help substantially with palm rejection. I've noticed though that some gloves seem to be better than others. More here: Drawing gloves.

My own use of touch

The very first thing I do with my tablets that support touch is disable the touch feature.

Notes on Wacom models

The recent Cintiq Pro 16 and 27 models from Wacom, introduced in 2021, 2022, and 2023, have much better touch than older Wacom models, but it is not as good as what you would get from an iPad.

Likewise, I have heard that touch support improved with the Wacom Intuos Pro PTH-x60 over the older Wacom Intuos Pro PTH-x51 series.

Resources

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