Huion Kamvas Pro 12 Review

Price: $299.99 + See it on Amazon

This is the Huion Kamvas Pro 12. It’s got Huion’s new laminated display and also a pen with tilt support. Let's check it out.

The Huion 12 is a pen display. Basically a second monitor that plugs into you Windows or Mac PC allowing you to draw in it with the included pen.

There is something really cool to having a giant display tablet to draw on. All that space. It is nice but there are some real benefits to having something small like this instead. If you shift between drawing and other tasks a smaller device is much easier to move to the side. Or if you want to take it with you this is somewhat portable.

I say somewhat because you do need to remember to bring the main cord, and the power cord with you and since there is no battery it will need to be plugged in, so it’s semi-portable.

Another benefit is that most of these displays are only HD, that’s 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels. On the 11.6” display of the Kamvas Pro 12 that looks really nice and crisp. When you take that resolution and blow it up to something like Huion’s 22” display it doesn’t looks as good.

It also helps that the colors on this are pretty good. It has 120% Adobe RGB. I can’t really tell the difference hard hard core color nerds like that stuff.

The screen has a anti glare coating on it. You can see it pretty well in my videos here because it’s under a lot of light. It actually looks really good when it’s just sitting on my desk in normal lighting conditions. It also provides a little bit of drawing resistance and feels good to use with the stylus.

The big deal about this display is that it is laminated. On most of these non-Wacom screens there is a lot of space between the glass you’re drawing on and the screen below it. That also creates an effect a lot of folks cal parallax where it can be hard to judge exactly where your cursor is because of that extra space.

So this display is more accurate than most others out there and that’s a pretty big deal.

Another big deal is that the pen has tilt support. This is something that Wacom has always had but these 3rd party displays have not. Huion has rolled this out on their 22 Pro, their 13 Pro and now here on the 12 pro.

This latest gen of Huion products have taken big steps forward to catch up with Wacom at a fraction of the price.

This also has the benefit of coming with a stand. It’s the same stand that comes with most of Huion’s smaller products. It’s not bad. You can set it at different angles it’s fairly lightweight and doesn’t move around much.

Every so often with devices that come from Chinese companies you get some interesting translation quirks. All of Huion’s products come with warm tips.

We also have shortcut keys! The keys themselves are comfortable, I like the soft feel of the plastic along the side. One thing I don’t like about this design is that the power button and the setting button are right there with the express keys. I don’t look at the express keys, I go by feel, kind of like typing on a keyboard. And the power button feels like an express key, it looks like an express key. And I was always hitting the settings key accidentally. I can see myself hitting the power as well. I would like to see them move those buttons away from they shortcut keys in future iterations.

The slider in the middle is good for changing brush sizes or zooming. It worked really well wasn’t to sensitive or not sensitive enough.

The better screen and tilt support are great additions

But One area where they have taken a step back is in the quality of line you get from this pen.

I covered this in my 13 review. There are new drivers and it might be a little better, but it’s definitely still there.

Other than those wavy lines this pen is pretty good. I test things like the pressure which is good, and it holds pressure at different levels really well. I like to text fast hatch lines to see how those do make sure there isn’t and blobbing at the end of lines or check marks and here my lines are clean and looking good.

And lastly I’m looking for wave and jitter.

I test at different speed. First a medium speed with a ruler and you can see there is some wave coming through there. Slower line is also giving some wave. When I speed up how fast I’m drawing the line that wave stars to go away.

I’ve started doing a new test in Photoshop with waves and jitter. Photoshop has a stroke straightener so I draw the line with that turned off. Then I draw a line with that set to about 10% Then another line at 20% Then a line at 30%

You get the idea, at what point does it knock out the wave or jitter. If I can kill it with around 10-25% I’m pretty happy with that. More than that and I feel the stroke straightener gets in the way of me drawing.

I love where Huion is going with its pen displays. They screen improvements are a big deal, the tilt added to the pen is a big deal. And I heard from a lot of folks on my Pro 13 review that their style wasn’t affected at all by the pen wave and they didn’t even notice it.

Right now, I’m putting this below the XP-Pen 12 on my list of smaller display tablets over on my website.

You’re getting all these great features at a pretty good price, right now I’m seeing it for around $270. The 13 is around $400.

When I grade these I grade on a curve. Because this is so inexpensive I think it’s a good value. For under $300 I don’t expect it to be as good as a Wacom Cintiq, so the fact that it comes close in many ways is a real testament to how far Huion has come.

If you need really crisp ink lines, go for the XP-Pen 12 I reviewed a couple weeks ago. If you really want less parallax, and need tilt support go for this one.

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