The Steve B Graphics Studio Ltd. Blog: February 2020

The Veikk A30 Pen Tablet

Vector Artwork drawn in Adobe Illustrator with the Veikk A30 (coloured in Adobe Photoshop)

I’ve become quite the fan of Veikk tablets. Last year I purchased the A15 for the office and was impressed with the quality/functionality for the price – I now wanted a new tablet for the home office, so once again, after searching online and looking at all the tablets now on offer by various brands such as XP-Pen, Huion etc (not forgetting Wacom – they are just more expensive!), I decided to once more give Veikk a spin – this time it’s the A30…

The box contains the usual suspects: Tablet (obviously!), Pen, USB-C cable, spare nibs (& extractor tool), instruction manual and a ‘Thank you for purchasing this tablet’ card which, on reverse, gives you a link where to download the drivers (no more CD’s!).

It’s not clear exactly what the guarantee is on this, but there are contact details listed for the Veikk website – plus, if you’re not happy and/ or the product is faulty, I guess you can simply return to Amazon etc…

After unplugging my older, smaller tablet and un-installing the drivers, I plugged in the A30, went to Veikks website and downloaded/installed their drivers (interestingly, their drivers are a ‘one size fits all’ type – all their tablets run off the same drivers and are automatically detected).

The tablet itself has a nice large 10”x6” drawing area – it really does seem huge compared to my old skool Wacom Bamboo 6”x4” I was still using! It’s quite thin (9mm), but feels very sturdy and well built – it’s very light and can be easily chucked into a laptop bag etc…

It’s nice to see USB-C being used – its ‘looks’ a lot neater and takes up less room on my already cramped workspace (plus you don’t have to go through that ritual of ALWAYS plugging in a USB the wrong way around first…!) 😊

OK – test time…

On the left side of tablet is a glossy vertical ‘strip’ which is where the touch-pad sits and four programmable ‘touch key’s (or ‘buttons’). I found using the touch pad was great in Photoshop etc – swiping up/down zoomed in/out of the canvas accordingly – similarly, swiping left/right increased/decreased the brush size too – a great timesaver when drawing/designing against an impending deadline – it all helps!

One thing I noticed was that if used in a nice bright environment, the touch keys were easier to see – if you sit in a darker room/office, you can’t actually see them as well as they are flush with the tablet surface i.e. they aren’t raised or recessed… they do actually light up blue when accessed – it’s a shame you haven’t the option in the software to keep them on permanently (like a backlit keyboard), but it’s not really a deal breaker – you’ll get used to it as you use the tablet more…

The pen is nice and light and doesn’t require charging! Still not sure what type of magic is used for this(!), but it feels nice to use and has the usual two buttons – one for ‘right-click’ mouse functionality the other for using the pen as an ‘eraser’ (or ‘rubber’ as we say in the UK! 😊) – as with the touch keys, you can re-assign them in the software to suit the way you work…

It has 8192 levels of ‘pressure sensitivity’ – not sure how many levels I used to create the illustration accompanying this review, but I was able to produce a nice tapered stroke…

Overall, for just £46, this tablet does everything I wanted at a great price… drawing feels smooth and the touch pad works really well - it’s also a nice looking tablet to have on my desk!

Veikk are a fairly new player in the graphics tablet market AFAIK, but based on my experience with what they have produced so far, they really are great value for money – more competition is always good for us designers and/or the end-user – I look forward to using more of their tablets in the future!

Artwork was created in Photoshop CC 2019 on a Windows 10 PC using the Veikk A30 tablet.