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Wacom Bamboo Fun | 
| Brand: Wacom
Department: mens
Buy New: Too low to display
as of 7/31/2010 11:57 CDT details
New (15) Used (2) Refurbished (1) from $137.99
Seller: J&R Music and Computer World
Rating:  76 reviews
Color: Silver
Media: Electronics
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 13.3 x 8.8 x 0.2
Warranty: 1 year warranty
MPN: CTH661
Model: CTH661
UPC: 753218993755
EAN: 0753218993755
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | 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 |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Bamboo Fun lets you get hands-on with your creative projects, combining the benefits of Multi-Touch with the comfort and precision of Wacom's ergonomically-designed pen.With Multi-Touch, you can navigate, scroll, and work with simple hand gestures. With the tablet's large touch area, you have more room to navigate than you do with other touch devices like computer trackpads and mobile phones. Need precision? Pick up the pressure-sensitive pen to draw, sketch, edit photos, and add handwritten elements to your creations. The generous size of Bamboo Fun gives you lots of space for creative freedom, making it simple and comfortable to use. Bamboo Fun works with your existing computer: desktop or laptop, PC or Mac. Attach it to a standard USB port and set it comfortably by your keyboard. You can even customize your Bamboo Fun experience by assigning your own shortcuts to the four ExpressKeys. Combines the benefits of pen and Multi-Touch input into one tabletUse a single finger for navigation and multiple fingers for gesturesSimple gestures make it easy to scroll, zoom, rotate, move backward or forwardPressure-sensitive pen tip for natural pen and brush strokesBattery-free, ergonomic pen with two switchesTextured work surface for a pen-on-paper feelQuick access to user-defined shortcuts with four ExpressKeyAttached fabric loop conveniently secures penEasy USB connectionInteractive tutorial helps you helps you learn gestures and make the most of your Bamboo
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 76
 Fantastic tablet for the money! October 20, 2009
Meghan (Norwood, MA USA)
70 out of 72 found this review helpful
I spent quite a bit of time looking at various tablets, reading reviews, and trying to figure out which had the most bang for the buck; the Bamboo Fun won in just about every category. Please note that I am not a professional graphic artist, just a hobbyist (though technically savvy enough to understand the features [eg pressure sensitivity]), so I'm reviewing it from that perspective.
Installation was a snap. Download the latest drivers from the Wacom site, plug it into a USB port, and you're all set. I tried it out on two laptops and a desktop and installation was flawless on each.
The tablet is thin and light, with a more-than-adequate amount of active space (I wanted something that would let me do longer strokes without feeling cramped). The multi-touch capability is really nice with graphics programs that support it; being able to pan and zoom with my left hand while my right remains mostly dedicated to drawing is great (and a quick press of one of the Bamboo's 4 buttons will turn touch off, which comes in handy [no pun intended]). For reference, the touch-sensitive area is 7.5" x 5.1" and the pen-active area is a fairly generous 8.5" x 5.4". You can configure it for left-handed use (lefties rejoice!).
The tablet is very smooth and responsive with Sketchbook Pro and ArtRage 2.5. I wasn't that thrilled with Corel Painter 4 Essentials, which comes bundled with it; the UI was clunky and not very intuitive (spend the $20 on ArtRage instead - you won't regret it). The Bamboo Fun also comes bundled with Photoshop Essentials, which should be useful if you don't already have a full version of Photoshop.
The battery-less pen, with two configurable buttons and 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity, is very comfortable in the hand and I admit it, I love the eraser on the end. :) The tablet has a fabric loop on one side for holding the pen when transporting it.
The tablet comes with three extra nibs and an extraction tool, which isn't listed in the product description.
Overall, for a couple of steps above entry level I wouldn't hesitate to recommend the Bamboo Fun as a great tablet for the price.
Wacom has a winner! December 26, 2009
Brian R. Sakowicz (Apopka, FL United States)
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
I just got the Bamboo Fun yesterday, so my review may not be as complete as it could be, but I will give my first impressions here. Let me start out by saying that I've been using a Graphire at the company I work for and an Intuous2 at home for about 7 years, so I have plenty of experience using tablets from Wacom. The size of this thing is huge... in a good way. At 13 inches, it literally is about the size of a Macbook, so you should be sure that you have plenty of desk space to fit this tablet. I always found the smaller 4x6 tablets to be tight, especially when doing graphic work, so this really lets you get to it.
Having using some multi-touch on a Macbook and an iPod touch, I found the use of this tablet pretty easy to adapt to. There are some gestures that do take a little bit of getting used to, such as the click and drag and the right-click. Once I had gotten used to it, it was pretty easy. You can access video tutorials on the use of the Bamboo in the Preference Pane in OS X. I would recommend taking a look through them before getting started. Once really nice feature are the 4 programmable buttons on the pad. I do not recommend re-programming the top button, which is set by default to such off the touch function. Why would you want to do that? So you won't accidentally brush the tablet with your hand while using the pen in Photoshop. This is a great help. My ONLY negative I find is that there is no mouse available for the tablet. Once in a while, I do appreciate the precision of a mouse and it would have been nice for that option.
Finally, there are those who would say "If you are going to do REAL graphics work, you need to get the Intuous". Bull. For years, the Intuous series had 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity while the Bamboo and Graphire only had 512. Well, the Bamboo is now comparable at 1024 as well. For a designer or freelancer on a budget, who wants some advanced features in a quality tablet, I cannot recommend this tablet enough.
UPDATE: After using the tablet for a week now, the first thing I would suggest is to download the latest drivers for the tablet from the Wacom website. For some reason, the tablet would recognize my dragging on it, but not clicking and the right-click gesture was not working well. After the driver update, all was better!
Love it! Wish I had gotten it sooner. December 12, 2009
Steve Skinner
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
I love everything about the Bamboo Fun! For my desktop it's far better than a mouse. I do web development, graphic design, and photography so for my type of work it's sort of a no-brainer. There's so much more control with photo and graphics work using a tablet than there ever could be with a mouse.
As I've used it more, I've gotten more used to the pen, which is probably the fastest way to work with your computer. When I first started, I used finger touch since it was something I was already familiar with from working with the touch pad on my laptop. That's what the tablet is like when used with your finger - a giant touch pad, but it's so much better because of the space you have to work with for motion. Plus, there are certain usability things that make using your computer and software so much easier - like finger gestures. You may have heard of mouse gestures, which are in some web browsers that have add-on software that allow you to swipe left and right to perform a back or next click in your browser. Well, with the Bamboo tablets, you can navigation backwards and forwards with a finger swipe left or right in any software on your computer. It's not just isolated to web browsing. This one thing makes a tablet really convenient for computer use.
The more I use it the more I find that certain types of activities are best done with the fingers and some are better with the pen. Surfing the web, for example, is definitely a finger touch activity. Photo manipulation or working with files in my web development apps is definitely a pen job. Every user could have their own style of using a tablet but that's what great about it.
There is definitely a learning curve with this thing so if you decide to give it a try, be patient and make yourself use it a lot for at least a week. The first day I had mine I was already thinking of returning it. It felt awkward and slow. Now though... I wish I had gotten one a long time ago. I now dislike having to use a mouse for many things.
This isn't for everyone though. If you are just a casual computer user, you may not find this as valuable as someone who edits photos, does graphics, etc.
Fantastic for the money (especially for $30 off on Amazon) December 25, 2009
David Arbor (Orlando, FL)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I was excited for this tablet from the moment it launched but waited to buy it for quite some time. I had reservations from the lack of reviews and then the ones that were around said that the touch gestures were sub-par. For about five years I had a Wacom Graphire 4 which had a 4x6 total area and a much smaller active area. I learned Photoshop with this thing and really liked it. I've gotten to a point where I am doing far more complicated things and the size of my Graphire was just too small for my 23in. monitor. I purchased this and instantly loved it from the time I plugged it in. I installed the original driver from the disc because I wanted to see if I experienced the same problems with the non-responsive touchpad like others have but I was having issues with getting it to work at all. I just wanted to play with my new tablet so I didn't feel like diagnosing something that I was going to upgrade anyway.
After I upgraded to the latest and greatest version of the driver, everything worked perfectly. I haven't had any issues with a lack of response from using the touchpad. I customized the touch speed and sensitivity to my liking as well as the pen sensitivity and tablet buttons. So far this works exactly how I had hoped and the larger size makes a world of a difference when working on detailed compositions in Photoshop. I have yet to do too much where I would notice the difference between the 512 levels of sensitivity that my Graphire 4 pen had versus the 1024 that the Bamboo Fun has, but I'm sure it will be much nicer to work with anyway.
The biggest thing for me is that this is so much bigger than what I had before. Since I have such a large monitor, that means that the smaller the tablet the more monitor area each point on the tablet represents - this translates to less accurate pointing on my part and this has improved by an amazing factor with the Bamboo Fun. I love that it's a wide format so when I force aspect ratios on it, I lose an insignificant amount of work space.
I really like the touchpad and I'm seriously considering dropping my mouse. It will take some effort not to keep going back to the mouse since I'm definitely faster on it, but the tablet has some serious productivity advantages in terms of speed.
I installed the Nik Color Efex plugin which seems not to be the software that is sold on Nik's website, but just a special Photoshop plugin made for Wacom. I have yet to use this, but will definitely check it out.
If anyone has any questions, leave a comment and I'll answer what I can for you.
Overall I think this has been a fantastic purchase and for those who are serious about Photoshop but don't want to cough up $350 for the medium Intuos tablet, I think this is great (plus you get a multi-touch trackpad!) Also, for those waiting around for the Intuos 5 with multi-touch it doesn't seem like that will be coming anytime soon. The Intuos 4 just came out this past March and before that the timeline of the Intuos series has been on a 3 year update track.
I'm really an editor who just loves Photoshop so I plan to take this with me into Final Cut Pro and Motion. I have used my old Graphire in FCP before and it is just too slow to work with since it was so small and I loved using it in motion because of the built-in pen gestures but I have a feeling that I'll be able to edit with just the tablet and my keyboard now that I have the Bamboo Fun.
I just realized that I didn't really put anything in here addressing how well the pen worked. Simply put - perfectly. It works just as well as my Graphire 4 and probably better. If you have a smaller Wacom and you're looking to upgrade, I think this is worth the money for the size and nowhere else has it for $30 off list. If you've never owned a tablet before and you're looking for a long term commitment with a good size, I think you'll be blown away at just how much more accurate you can be in Photoshop with this. My work is way better just because I can adjust the opacity of my brush just with pressure and since I am a lefty this is far more accurate than holding a mouse for me.
For the Price Point, This Is Best In Class January 11, 2010
PD (Heartland)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I've read some of the other reviews on this Bamboo Fun bundle and I suggest you do the same if you're starting on a tablet for the first time (or coming back to it after many years). I won't go to that lengthy detail, but I will point out why I think this is a great package mostly everyone.
The main selling points on this tablet are the resolution and the size: it offers 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity which would have cost 5x the price a few years ago. This means that drawing lines and shapes with good responsive pressure sensitivity is a breeze. The higher end tablets used by graphic artists in the industry used to be 1,024 for quite a while! so this is nice. Also, this tablet is BIG, about 13"x9", quite a nice size! You can trace from practically a whole sheet of paper. For the selling price, this is a hard deal to beat. BUT--then you add in the bundled software and it's a no-brainer. I do own Photoshop already so I don't need the bundled Photoshop Elements, but it's great for those starting with nothing. Plus you get Corel Painter Essentials and a REALLY nice Photoshop plug-in called Nik Color Efex which the pro version costs more than this tablet bundle!
No brainer--if you want to start on a tablet and want something better than "rental skates", start here. YES, I did aquire this through Vine, but I will be buying another one in the near future, and it's going to be this tablet or whatever might replace it in the future.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 76
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