Cintiq if you can afford it.
Amazon has a decent price but they are expensive pretty much everywhere you look.
I bought the Cintiq 21 last year. Took me a long time to work up the nerve to buy one, but now my only regret is that I didn't buy it sooner. To me, the step from regular tablet to Cintiq was as significant as the step from mouse to tablet. If you can't afford to buy one right now, just save your money until you can.
I don't know much about tablet PCs, but I suspect they are pretty underpowered. I am entertaining the idea of buying the new iPad as a digital sketch device, but I wouldn't expect to do serious work on it.
^^ What Clutch said.
Yeah. Tablet PCs are nice, but won't likely have the levels of pressure and control that a Cintiq has.
Haha! this is something i can actually advise on. The average tablet PC is a notetaker at best, it's resolution is only good enough to get you to where you need to go and make passable approximations of human writing. They are banking on the fact that your hand has the muscle memory to know how to draw a character(letter not character) without the need for a visual response. Art i would say more often than not requires a visual response the tablet has to work to calculate the line you've drawn by connecting the dots of it's poor touch resolution. There will be a noticeable delay. Otherwise tablets would be massively more popular than they are today.
In short, a cintiq is the way to go.
I wouldn't expect a ipad to be much of an improvement over the iphone or ipod touch as far as touch accuracy it may be worse, with bigger icons/targets your need for an accuracte screen decreases, at $500 base (where a iphone is nearly the same) there are a few options A) they are hemmoraging money on the ipad B) the iphone is massively overpriced C) they cut corners where they could aka the screen.
sorry for the tangent, somehow I got sucked into this whole thing, i don't have an interest in apple products...normally.
Roxy On DA...Finally!
If the iPad performs at least as good as the iPhone, it would make a decent sketching device. I've used a few drawing programs on the iPhone, and they function well-enough - the problem is that drawing with my finger is very awkward, and the screen just isn't big enough. A bigger screen with a stylus might just make it doable.
I'm hearing some reports that the pad response is snappier than the phone, so that's good... but no idea about the touch sensing resolution.
I'm looking to purchase something that will allow me to work directly on screen with a stylus. As much as I like my genius tablet, it's not very comfortable to draw on the tablet with having to look up at the screen itself.
What would ya'll suggest? Links and prices would be great.
Thanks in advance!