Huion Kamvas Pro 13 (2.5K) Pen Display GBAtemp review
Hardware
Product Information:
- Official Store: https://huion.uk/products/huion-kamvas-pro-13-2-5k
I’m not unfamiliar to Huion tablets, and if you’re remotely into digital art, you probably won’t be either. Having used one of their simpler non-screened tablets in the Inspiroy Q11K since 2017, I can vouch for their tablets being easy to use and working well. I’m by no means an artist, but I love the idea of being able to just pick up a tablet and doodle away, but when you stick a screen on your graphics tablet, it becomes capable of so much more. With the Kamvas Pro 13 2.5k model having been out for just over a year now, there’s plenty of reviews out there from seasoned digital artists, so I wanted to approach this slightly differently as a doodler, a multitasker, and a simple lover of touch screens. Is it worth it for your average tech enthusiast to pick this up? That’s what I’m here to figure out.
Out of the box we have a fairly hefty assortment of goodies to look at. Outside of the tablet itself, we have a horde of cables to choose between, an adjustable stand, the pen, a doughnut to hold the pen, and an odd-looking glove. The box itself is about as nice-looking as you’d expect it to be for a graphic design tool, and it all comes out easily. The tablet features a 2.5K screen, coming in at 2560x1600 for the growingly-popular 16:10 aspect ratio, and feels really quite premium to hold. Along the side you have seven buttons that can be remapped via software. By default these function as, from top to bottom, B, ], [, Ctrl+, Ctrl-, Space, and Ctrl/Alt/Z. These are all fairly usable out of the box with something like Clip Studio Paint if you’re not wanting to go out of your way to install Huion’s software. The buttons each have a different embossed mark on them to make them easy to differentiate by touch, with the top being blank, then a circle, dash, and the middle being a dot. From there they repeat in reverse. It’s really easy to pick up and start using once you’ve got down which button does what.
Outside of the 13 inch screen being 2.5K, it’s also interestingly-textured thanks to it being laminated anti-glare glass. If you happen to have a Kindle Oasis, it feels a lot like that to touch. It’s much softer than your standard glossy panels, but with a sturdiness you wouldn’t expect from a matte display. Something that will take a bit of getting used to is the granular look this layers on top of your image. It’s something I previously saw on the secondary display of my Zephyrus Duo and it does soon fall out of mind, but it can take away from an otherwise sharp and crisp image. The colours on the screen look great with 145% sRGB coverage, and setting it up can be as simple as plugging in one USB C cable, this assuming your device is capable of DP over USB C to be able to power the device. If it isn’t though, you there are two slightly more cumbersome options you can pick between. If you have a USB C but it doesn’t support DP over USB C, you can just plug in a separate power cable to the tablet that can be connected to a wall or anything else that can offer a USB plug power. If your PC is a little older and has a humble HDMI port, you can use the exceptionally odd-looking three-headed cable that features a HDMI, data USB, and power USB. With HDMI by itself unable to drive touch events, you need to dedicate a USB port. It does work well though, and I’m glad it was considered as an option. With my tablet having a spare Thunderbolt port, I was thankfully able to use a single cable and that worked flawlessly too.
Coming from 2017’s Inspiroy Q11K, I can see some clear improvements in the drawing department. The pen in particular stands out as a really simple evolution that sticks to the same ideas they had back then. It’s slightly slimmer, slightly lighter, and no longer requires what I have come to dub the “pinprick cable” to charge it. In fact, you don’t need any cable to charge it, which is genuinely stellar when coming from a Surface Pen’s AAAA batteries, or the awkwardly-hidden USB C ports of other PC pens. They’re not quite like for like comparisons, but no charging is only a good thing in my mind. Hidden inside the doughnut, you have access to an additional ten pen nibs, with the doughnut itself doubling as a nib remover. This is something Huion have done for a while and it works well. Something new to me however is the inclusion of five felt nibs, on top of the five more traditional plastic ones. Using these are an entirely different world in terms of feel. It’s much softer, and saying it feels like a felt tip is probably the most apt, given these are actually just felt tips for the pen. Naturally however, these do wear down faster than the plastic nibs, and I did notice fraying of the material within an hour of use. On top of that, I found them far more loose in the pen itself, and while they wouldn’t fall out, they didn’t take much to come out at all. I think if you want a different feel and you’re happy to be delicate about it, these offer a genuinely refreshing change, but I couldn’t see myself using them all the time.
Your drawing experience as a whole is a fairly standard affair. You have 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity, and a touch screen that will only register the pen. This is the ultimate form of palm rejection, and this style of screen will be favoured by some for that, and disliked by others for the fact they can’t pan across the canvas easily with a free hand, or rotate using two fingers. I’m in the crowd of liking it though. A small quirk for those not wanting to install the driver is that you’ll need to set it as your primary display for the touch to register correctly, but if you’re happy to have the software, any display can be controlled using the touch screen. The stand can be adjusted between 20 and 45 degrees, which are both great for drawing, but not so great if you wanted to keep the tablet plugged in and use it as a secondary display when not being creative. Propping it up on an adjustable stand works well, but it’s a bit of a shame the included stand couldn’t have a slightly steeper setting. The glove mentioned earlier was a surprisingly significant improvement as somebody who’s never used one before. This type of glove looks odd, and wraps around just the ring and little finger. What this does however is allow your hand to glide across the display with no resistance. It’s great for traversing the canvas and drawing smooth, clean lines.
The Huion software hasn’t changed in the past six years, at least to my eye. You install it, and then you have a simple set of screens that give you everything you need to. The features it has are all the things I touched on earlier; you can pick your display, you can remap the buttons, and you can also calibrate the display if you feel your inputs are landing off the mark. My only criticism with it is that after installing the software, the mouse pointer would always be on-screen. Without the driver, the pointer follows whatever you set in Windows, whether this is hiding it, or using a smaller cursor to better show the screen. The driver appears to ignore this, always showing a mouse cursor. Googling the issue, the community consensus was to uninstall the driver, which is what I ended up doing. It’s not a huge loss if you’re happy to have the tablet as your default display, and are happy with its default buttons. It would be better to see this addressed however.
Looking at wider uses for the tablet, you really can just think of it as a very nice 2.5K display. If you have a compatible system, it’s incredibly easy to add it to your setup with just a single cable, and being able to reach for it whenever you need to doodle, note take, or even draw something out in Paint while on a call with a colleague, it all just works. The response time isn’t great for gaming at 25ms, and a standard refresh rate of 60Hz, but it is workable for lighter games that favour a touch screen. If you’re a Bloons fan you’ll be in for a grand time. If you did plan on using this for games and the like, I would recommend diving into the Pen and Touch section of Control Panel on Windows, and disabling the “Press and hold” action. This can cause odd behaviours in games like Bloons where you just want to click and drag things. Outside of that though it really is good to go.
Not being a full time digital artist and still wanting to put the tablet through a fair stress test, I opted for the only thing I thought was reasonably in my skillset: Pokemon Ranger. Once I had fiddled around in Control Panel, melonDS worked without issue, and I was drawing rings in no time. Despite the input delay, I was perfectly able to draw rings around even the most elusive of targets, and the display stood up find to some really quite rigorous inputs. I can’t imagine too many artists attacking the screen as I did, so I feel confident in saying it’ll last a decent length of time for most. With emulators like Citra and Cemu offering multi-window options, it’s great to have it set in front of me solely displaying the lower touch screen. I wish there were something for the DS that supported this too, and I’m hoping in time melonDS might meet my hopes.
What is probably the weirdest feature that falls far beyond the traditional use case of this tablet is the fact it can function as a Switch dock out of the box. And I’m not talking about plugging the HDMI cable into a dock, it functions as a Switch dock using a single cable, with Huion advertising this themselves via their YouTube channel. It does work as advertised, but it did lead me to look into the tablet’s settings to see if there was a way to set it to a 16:9 aspect ratio. There is not. But oddly, there is an option to set it to 4:3. I can’t fathom why this would be remotely useful compared to the more standard 16:9, and it is a genuine shame it lacks this option. I’m not saying I would use this as a Switch display, but further flexibility on a device like this really just adds to the reasons to buy it.
At £350 I think Huion have done a great job in offering an incredibly flexible graphics tablet. The drawing experience is great and as a package, it goes a long way in justifying its value. While you can get cheaper portable displays, and at a similar price point, get ones more catered to gaming with low input delay and higher refresh rates, Huion have created what I would view as an almost-perfect all rounder. It’s easy to setup, easy to use, and easy to transition between using it as a traditional display and getting your creativity onto canvas. If you’re in the market for a graphics tablet or a portable display, it’s one worth checking out.
Verdict
- Fantastic pen-on-screen feel
- Pen doesn't require charging
- Easy to setup and customise
- Great-looking screen
- One cable solution
- Driver software could use some work on Windows
- No 16:9 display option for display
