Huion H610, K58, and W58 Tablet Review Round-up

With the H610, K58, and W58, Huion’s industrial design leapfrogs Monoprice’s tablets and begs for comparison to Wacom’s offerings. While the Monoprice tablets I reviewed previously were the best bang for your drawing buck at the time, these new Huion tablets offer a significant bump in specifications and fit and finish without a huge leap in price.

Huion’s line of tablets use the same UC-Logic pen digitizer technology as Monoprice’s tablets. Monoprice’s hotkeys felt flimsy and the stylus was serviceable and utilitarian. No one would call the Monoprice tablets things of beauty, but it was easy to overlook these shortcomings given their price. At around ten percent of the cost of comparable Wacom tablets, with equal or better performance in many regards, the Monoprice line of tablets was my punk-rock drawing tool of choice when not using tablet monitors on my desktops.

Perfect for throwing into a laptop bag, and cheap enough to not have to worry about destroying during travel, the Monoprice filled a niche. Since that initial purchase, I’ve acquired more than two dozen additional UC-Logic based tablets and monitors for testing and possible review.

Aside from Yiynova’s U-designated line of graphics tablet monitors, few of those purchases have been noteworthy enough to warrant additional spotlight. I’m pleased to say that the Huion tablets reviewed here replaced my Monoprice tablets as my go-to, portable drawing solutions. You’d still have to pry my Note II or Yiynova MSP19U from my cold, dead hands, but, in the graphics tablet space, Huion’s tablet line won me over.

Hardware Specifications

The H610, K58, and W58 all have a digitizer with 2048 levels of pressure, 5080 LPI, and a report rate of 233 reports per second. All tablets have detachable mini-USB cable connections and come with battery operated styli.

The H610 includes eight user-programmable hotkeys and has a 10” x 6” active working area.

The K58 and W58 have a smaller, hotkey-less active area of 8” x 5.” In the case of the W58, an internal Li-Ion battery claims 30 hours of use before needing to be charged via it’s included mini-USB cable. The W58 can be used as a wired tablet while charging via your systems USB port.

The P80 is a rechargeable stylus with an internal Li-Ion battery that comes bundled with the K58. It claims 800 hours of continuous use before needing a recharge. In practice, I found the stylus held a charge for a few days at a time. Recharging is done via a USB cable that has a proprietary connector on one end that plugs into the stylus.

The P80 can be used with the other Huion tablets, but must be purchased separately.

Installation and Setup for the H610 and K58

Like all the other UC-Logic hardware I’ve tested, the biggest obstacle is neither price nor drawing capability, but initial setup. Make sure to download Huion’s customized UC-Logic driver directly from their site. Install it before plugging your tablet in for the first time.

In OS X, the tablet can behave strangely if you have third party mouse-steering apps installed. Logitech drivers and USB Overdrive are repeat offenders. An engineer at Adobe contacted me when his UC-Logic tablet’s cursor stuck to the top left corner of his screen and, after a few days of painstaking processes of elimination, we determined that his third party mouse app had stymied the tablet.

In Windows, be sure to install the drivers before plugging the tablet in. Windows has insidious default tablet drivers it will install otherwise. They don’t work well and you’ll swear there’s something wrong with your hardware. There isn’t. Deleting your HID stack in Device Manager is the only help here and even it may not work. You may have to reinstall a fresh copy of the OS. Additionally, in Windows 7 at least, disable Tablet PC services from the services menu. Uninstall Tablet PC components. Uncheck “Support Tablet PC Features” from the tablet driver icon in the system tray. Minimally, disable Pen Flicks. All of these things impact drawing performance. I haven’t tested any of these devices on Windows 8 as yet.

One side effect of doing these reviews is that I’ve become defacto technical support on a whole host of common problems associated with nearly all graphics tablets. I can’t help everyone, but I do try. Please take my advice. Install the drivers before plugging the tablet in. Don’t use third party mouse mods. Graphics tablets everywhere will thank you. And so will I.

Installation and Setup of the W58

The wireless capability of the W58 is unique. The tablet works in both wired and wireless modes, but the initial setup is the same as its corded brethren. Aside from being finicky about software-before-hardware installation order, I encountered no installation issues in Windows.

In OS X, I was completely unable to get the W58 to work. When drawing a stroke, the beginning and ends would blob out to full pressure regardless of how light I pressed. While in wireless mode, attempting to open the PenTablet driver app in Applications would result in system freezes and application crashes. I tested the W58 on three MacPro towers with OSes ranging from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, a 2012 MacBook Air, and a new Mac Mini with the same results.

I wrote Huion asking for advice and they sent a second piece of hardware along. During testing, they said to try and use the tablet without any drivers installed. Despite this sounding entirely counterintuitive, I gave it a shot. No dice. The same problem occurred. Strokes blobbed out at their beginning and ends while appearing to respond accurately in the middle of their marks.

As it stands, I cannot recommend the W58 for OS X users. It’s a shame. The hardware was small and light enough that tossing it into my laptop bag as my default, laptop-centric graphics tablet solution would’ve been a no-brainer otherwise.

Performance in Graphics Applications

The H610 and K58 performed well in both Windows and OS X. Slow, deliberate strokes showed some jitter and diagonal lines drawn at near 45 degrees seem to exacerbate the issue. This is a behavior common to all the UC-Logic hardware I’ve tested.

Post OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.3, some Mac users reported jitter issues with UC-Logic hardware. I found that installing Smooth Mouse to disable the cursor acceleration and alleviate the lag present in how the operating system handles mouse movement seemed to help. I personally haven’t had issues with jitter as I tend to draw fast and loose with long, sweeping strokes. I seldom hover slowly and deliberately while mark-making a single line. If you are a hesitant line-maker, bear this possible caveat in mind.

The bundled, AAA-powered stylus is a bit stiff out of the box. I’ve owned over seven of these Huion styli and a stiff pressure curve has been consistent among them all. The harder pressure curve is a welcome change from the mushy, easy-to-blow-out pressure curve of Wacom hardware, though is a smidge stiffer than I would like.

The Li-Ion, rechargeable, aftermarket P80 stylus has a pressure curve unique to any other UC-Logic styli I’ve tested. It feels in-hand like a Wacom stylus and has a pressure curve to match. Light strokes blow-out to full pressure without much effort. If their goal was to replicate a Wacom feel, warts and all, they’ve done it. The light pressure being so touchy is not a preference of mine and I didn’t use the rechargeable stylus much as a result. I’ve owned three of these rechargeable styli and all exhibited this behavior.

For the W58, performance in Windows was good. An occasional jitter or wonky mouse movement occurred with long use. I suspect those rare hiccups had to do with the 2.4ghz, wireless nature of the device. I enjoyed being less tethered to my workstation. I’m a big fan of workspace minimalism and the W58 appeals to the lizard cortex of my brain. If I’d managed to get the W58 working in OS X, I’d have been ecstatic.

Closing Thoughts

The H610 has lived in my laptop bag for six months. Its hotkeys feel firmer than the Monoprice 10” x 6.25.” It boasts 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity. The report rate of the digitizer is higher. The LPI is better. It has a detachable mini-USB cable. The industrial design of the stylus and tablet surface is akin to the Wacom tablets I cut my teeth on. The overall fit and finish feels high-end and not at all indicative of the sub-$60 price tag.

In all measures save for price, the Huion H610 and K58 could be placed on a shelf next to Wacom tablets and the average on-looker would guess they were equals. If you’re in the market for a budget Wacom-alternative, the Huion H610 is now the one I’d recommend.

My contacts at Huion tell me they’re working on a new tablet monitor and, after spending half a year using their products daily, I’m very excited to see what they do next.

As per usual, shopping on Amazon using my referral link helps support my efforts to review digital art hardware.

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