- Powerful tablet helps you create digital art, embellish photos, draw by hand, and more
- Intuitive ?Multi-Touch? system lets you navigate your computer using just your fingertips
- Included stylus features 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity; provides a pen-on-paper feel
- Compatible with Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP (Service Pack 2), and Mac OS X (10.4.8 or higher)
- Backed by Wacom?s 1-year manufacturer?s warranty
Product Description
Bamboo Fun lets you get hands-on with your creative projects, giving you the benefits of Multi-Touch along with the comfort and precision of Wacom’s ergonomically-designed pen. With Multi-Touch, you can navigate, scroll, and work with simple gestures in an area larger than on mobile devices or laptop trackpads. For precision work, pick up the pressure-sensitive pen to draw, sketch, edit photos, and add handwritten elements to your creations. The generous size of B… More >>
5 Responses to Wacom Bamboo Fun
T. Cakir
June 21st, 2010 at 4:02 am
I have bought this tablet fromk usa. and came back to europe. after than its surface began to sweal and lift off. I have contact with the seller but they say taht they can do nothing if I am not in the us. Also I have read that the surface is sketching. but they are not selling replaceble surfave for this tablet. So dont buy this unless you will gonne use it upto 3 months.
Rating: 1 / 5
Paul Sullivan
June 21st, 2010 at 4:14 am
Wacom’s Bamboo Fun Pen and Touch is not for you if you’re interested in the touch features and looking at this for use with regular non-graphics files ie, excel, word, acrobat. The sensitivity is not there for fine, fluid work.
For instance, a lot of the touch functionality comes from using 1 and/or 2 fingers, but the tablet struggles to register what you intended. Put 2 fingers down together and half the time the tablet thinks you are scrolling and the other half it thinks you want the right click menu. LIkewise, selecting text and then bringing up the right click menu is virtually impossible without inadvertently deselecting. Practice over a couple of weeks did not help.
Bamboo Fun does not make use of more than 2 fingers.
Beyond zoom, rotate, and scroll, there are several gestures that are promoted in the marketing videos, but do not appear to be supported or at least are not documented.
Support Manuals and Read Me’s are typically cumbersome and poorly arranged.
The software is stingy in the range of settings. For instance, the scrolling function is so “loose” that it’s hard to avoid scrolling horizontally when trying to scroll just vertically. This is a pain when scrolling a wide text and you keep losing one side or the other. There’s no setting to allow for just one direction scrolling. Something my $20 wheel mouse offers.
Some of the sensitivity issues mentioned above might be eliminated if you could turn off or calibrate certain functions, but that’s not available.
As for programming the buttons, they don’t seem to register multiple modifers like shift AND option.
Another odd thing. The eraser on the pen cannot be programmed as other than eraser which does no one any good in any but a graphics program.
Design wish: make the pen and touch areas the same (there’s only a 1/4″ or so difference) and then put in a perimeter band of a slightly different texture so my fingers know when they near the edge.
Rating: 1 / 5
Melanie M. Taylor
June 21st, 2010 at 5:08 am
The excitement around the wacom board was high but it was difficult to use. I am unable to say how it will work out but there are no books out to support the product. I am hoping it gets better because my 13 year old had watched videos on the internet and is still struggling with it. I have hope that we will find help but once you get it you need to reach out and get some support.
Rating: 3 / 5
R. Kamand
June 21st, 2010 at 6:12 am
I have previously had two other wacom tablets, a graphire and a intuos. I do a lot of photoshop work and i have come to really depend on wacom tablets, so, when my old tablet bit the dust i decide to give this one a try. I had very little interest in the touch feature and thank god for that because it’s not even up to trackpad standards. There are a few things about it that are cool, but it’s just too fickle to use on a daily basis.
I figured that since the tablet had the same sensitivity as the intuous 3 it would give me the same feel. WRONG. Now, perhaps i received a lemon, and from some of the reviews it may be, but this thing is awful. it’s not only the sensitivity either, the express keys will sometimes work and then for some reason will not respond. Even if i did receive a bad tablet i still can not get pass the feel of the included pen. This thing feels as if it was hacked together by a blind woodsman. This is basic stuff here, this is why i need a tablet and my needs are not being meet.
I debated whether to buy this tablet or the intuos 4 and i guess i made the wrong decision.
Rating: 2 / 5
Gulabau
June 21st, 2010 at 8:57 am
This is a review of the medium-sized “Bamboo Fun” tablet being sold in 2010. It responds to both pen and touch, and does not include a mouse.
I wish that I had not bought the tablet. There are several bothersome incidental issues, but the crucial problem is that the tablet technology is just too imprecise. You know how your signature looks sloppy and weird when you sign one of those electronic credit card pads at a big chain grocery store? As if all your movements, as you signed, were overextended; as if the pen were far off the surface and sort of aiming your signature at the pad instead of actually writing on it? To a lesser yet significant extent, that is the experience of drawing on the Bamboo Fun. The pen just does not give enough direct, immediate control even for my hobby artwork.
I used the tablet with both ArtRage 2 Deluxe and Corel Painter Essentials on my 2009 MacBook Pro running “Snow Leopard” OS X 10.6. I experienced various irritations due to poor matching of the tablet to the graphics software, and inadequate, ambiguous, or actually wrong instructions and tutorial information.
The tablet repeatedly crashed ArtRage. Neither Artrage nor Wacom has yet provided information that will keep this from happening.
When I first attempted to use Corel Painter Essentials, the tablet refused to use that application’s canvas. Instead, whenever I started to draw, a window with yellow ruled notebook paper (like early elementary school writing paper) appeared and my lines were scrawled on it, to the accompaniment of an irritating looping scratching noise. This problem was solved by turning off the handwriting detection in Ink (instructions say that handwriting detection must be on in order for the tablet to work), but then Corel Paint didn’t detect the tablet at all. The solution to that problem was to turn off the Touch function of the pad in Preferences. The Painter instructions say to only “use” the Pen function instead of Touch, but do not tell you that you must actually disable Touch.
Using the pen in Corel Painter Essentials to do original drawings and paintings was, as already described, unsatisfactory. The pen cursor is a tiny bit laggy in addition to behaving as if slightly “distant” from the “paper”.
Also the function switches on the pen are an annoyance. They are large and they are too near where I naturally hold the pen. They cannot be disabled but it is too easy to activate them accidentally while holding the pen to draw. Another small but repetitive nuisance.
When using the tablet as a mouse, not all gestures and selection methods on the tablet worked as depicted in the Wacom video tutorial. Wacom told me the tutorial is buggy and also suggested I uninstall the driver that they had provided on cd with the tablet (their instructions for how to do so were wrong) and install a different one from their website (they didn’t tell me that the proper driver has a different name from the original). The tablet works better now but it apparently changed the default behaviors of my mouse, which I had to re-set.
I expect there are solutions to the bugs and quirks, some of which are obviously not the fault of the tablet technology; a person might become accustomed to the pen design; but I still wish I had not bought the tablet. I got it mainly to do digital drawing and its slight sloppiness is still too sloppy for that purpose. I hear good things about Wacom’s higher-end Intuos tablets and maybe I’ll buy one of those, but absolutely *not* without trying it out first.
Later additional note — one week after purchase, the edge of the Bamboo Fun sensor screen began to bubble up and separate from the tablet. That’s the final straw. Back it goes.
Rating: 2 / 5