XP Pen Artist 24 Pro review: An affordable and professional pen display

XP Pen Artist 24 Pro Lifestyle Source: Windows Central

A few years ago, in that location were not many options for pen displays and digitizers for digital artists. Wacom held their heads up as the industry standard, and they were more than than happy to accuse a premium for their equipment. Unfortunately, the term "starving artist" exists for a reason, and these higher toll points meant Wacom's devices were out of attain for many creators. XP-Pen saw an opportunity to release a line of upkeep-friendly devices for digital artists, but their initial launch was rife with software issues.

After listening to the needs of their customers, still, XP-Pen's software and hardware both gradually improved, and they found themselves seated at the table as ane of the best alternatives to Wacom available for beginners, hobbyists, and upkeep-minded artists alike. With the success of their digitizers and smaller pen displays, XP-Pen began to increase their pen displays' sizes and price points. The Artist 24 Pro is the largest pen display currently available from XP-Pen. And then let'southward put it through some paces to run across if information technology justifies the higher toll tag that the larger workspace brings forth with it.

Xppenrecoblock

XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro

Bottom line: XP-Pen offers a professional grade pen display that can easily go toe to toe with pen displays that are nearly twice equally expensive. The Artist 24 Pro provides a solid mid-tier brandish choice for people who discover beginner displays defective in features but competitor pricing out of bounds.

The Good

23.v-inch drawing area
20 customizable hotkeys
2 customizable rotary wheels
Battery-free pen
USB-C to USB-C connectivity
ninety% Adobe RGB color accuracy

The Bad

Not a fully laminated screen
No dedicated eraser button on the pen

XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro: Price and availability

The XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro dropped with a $900 price tag, making it the about expensive pen brandish currently available in XP-Pen's lineup. That said, the cost should not necessarily be a deterrent if y'all're interested in this pen display, as it is frequently bachelor on Amazon with coupons for as much as $180 off. Its often available at similar prices online with other electronics retailers, including Newegg and XP-Pen'due south very own website.

XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro: Hardware and blueprint

Artist24prolifestylebox Source: Windows Primal

Category	XP-Pen Creative person 24 Pro
Display	16x9 aspect ratio, 2560x1440 (123 ppi) resolution, QHD, 60hz
Impact Screen	No
Screen Blazon	IPS, 178 degree viewing angle, 250 cd/m2 max brightness
Color Gamut	90% Adobe RGB
Ports	2x USB 2.0, 1x HDMI, 1x USB-C, 1x DC
Pen	8192 points of pressure, lx-degree tilt functionality, 200RPS report rate
Dimensions	25 inches x 14 inches, 23.8 inch diagonal
Weight	15.43 pounds

This is a huge, heavy, well-built monitor. Boasting a 23.8-inch workspace, the Artist 24 Pro overall measures approximately 25-past-xiv-inches and merely nether 2 inches deep, not including the attached adjustable stand. The monitor is designed with the ease of utilise of that stand up in mind, including rubberized feet at the bottom of the screen to prevent sliding and a pull tab at the tiptop of the stand up to adjust the monitor'southward angle. The stand up can be adjusted so that the monitor sits anywhere from xvi degrees upwardly to 90.

The monitor is as well a hefty xv pounds, then while it is possible to remove the stand up and attach it to a VESA mount, you may want to double-check the weight limits. In my excitement, I opted to put the XP-Pen brandish on my monitor arm and was quite surprised every bit the entire setup lurched forward. The occurrence defenseless me past surprise as I had previously had a Huion GT220 v2 on this aforementioned setup for nearly a twelvemonth and a half with no issue. After the monitor arm debacle, I decided to reattach the monitor stand up that came with the brandish and call it a day.

XP Pen Artist 24 Pro Monitor Stand Source: Windows Key

The good news is that the included monitor stand is just as solid every bit the residuum of the device. This is incredibly important because the very nature of a cartoon monitor is that you will put some weight on the device to depict. Earlier iterations of these displays struggled with being wobbly on stands that couldn't hold up to employ. Thankfully, the XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro has overcome that and is plenty capable of withstanding the employ that average artists will put it through.

The improved monitor stand is not the only upgrade the XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro has seen. Previous XP-Pen monitors had made the disquisitional mistake of running the cables downwards, resulting in an upshot where cables would sustain damage from beingness bent under if you were using the monitor at a flatter angle. The Artist 24 Pro has all of the ports — including two USB ii.0, an HDMI, and a USB-C port equally well every bit the outlet plug — are located to the user's right-mitt side, safely out of the way of whatsoever potential damage.

The improved monitor stand is not the only upgrade the XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro has seen

The XP-Pen Creative person 24 Pro display features a 2K resolution at 60hz, making it perfectly suitable for utilize as a primary display for one monitor gear up. Notwithstanding, information technology is worth pointing out that the Creative person 24 Pro does not accept a fully laminated screen. Fully laminating a pen display helps lower the parallax, that altitude betwixt the drawing under the screen and the tip of your stylus, which can aid brand you feel more like you're drawing directly onto the image rather than pushing the drawing through the glass. In that location is lamination on the screen, only there is also a thin layer of glass that increases that parallax but not to a disorienting caste.

Drawing on XP Pen Artist 24 Pro Source: Windows Key

The existing lamination on the Artist 24 Pro does provide some nice features, though. Primarily, information technology helps to reduce the glare on the monitor. Glare was an consequence I dealt with quite a lot with the Huion GT 220 v2 I used previously, as it had no lamination whatever. If the overhead lights or my desk lamps were on in the room, the glare from the Huion would make it nearly unusable. The Artist 24 Pro, in contrast, does more than to diffuse the glare from these lamps when they're on in the room and I'm working. In add-on to the anti-glare properties, the monitor also has a nice feeling of 'tooth' to it, giving the pen a piddling more grip that makes it feel more like drawing on newspaper.

The outer bezel of the Artist 24 Pro is a prissy matte black to reduce fingerprint smudging. It includes twenty customizable hotkeys and 2 reddish-ringed rotary wheels that tin too be customized in the monitor'southward commuter UI. The utilise of limited keys can be a hot push topic among pen display users, only personally, I plant them to exist a squeamish addition. Because of the 24 Pro's large size, I often had to move my keyboard out of the way to apply it properly, and so having the express keys to fall back on kept me from having to reach for the keyboard whenever I wanted to exercise something as simple as undo.

XP Pen Artist 24 Pro Rotary Dial and Express Keys Source: Windows Fundamental

The customizable rotary wheels have a metallic red ring, which is a nice centre-catching design that also helps make the wheels visible in your peripheral vision while yous're focused on drawing. Because at that place is no touch support for the Creative person 24 Pro, the rotaries give you the selection to have canvas zoom and brush size with just the touch on of a small dial. Having the wheels on each side of the display means they're suitable for left and right-handed users akin. Previous iterations of these displays forced users to cull whether they wanted to apply the left or right-hand side's express keys, but this 24 Pro removes the stipulation and lets the user determine to use any or all of the keys on their own discretion.

Along with the monitor and necessary cables, the Creative person 24 Pro comes with non just 1, merely two battery-costless pens, a handy pen holder, and eight replacement nibs that — despite all my years of digital art — I have never once needed. Each pen features the rubberized grip on the lower half of the butt, similar to what is used on the anxiety of the monitor and stand up, and the metallic red ring element seen on the rotaries, which is a nice blueprint touch. The pens too feature a rocker button that tin can be customized and is typically best used to swap betwixt your castor and eraser tools on the fly.

XP Pen Artist 24 Pro Stylus Source: Windows Central

Speaking of the eraser, that is the one chemical element that I miss the virtually on these upkeep pen displays. More expensive devices from Wacom and Xencelabs often include an "eraser" button, allowing you to casually flip the stylus to erase, similar a traditional pencil, and so swapping dynamically back to the brush when the tip returns to the screen. The stylus for the Artist 24 Pro does non have this eraser button; you're left to just tie upwardly your pen butt buttons with this function. That doesn't stop me from trying to erase with the end at least once per painting.

XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro: Software and performance

Drawing on XP Pen Artist 24 Pro Source: Windows Central

The idea of a pen display can seem overwhelming if you don't accept experience with them, but they're surprisingly piece of cake to set up. For the Artist 24 Pro, there are two ways y'all can choose to connect to your computer. The get-go beingness the included USB-C to USB-C cable. If your PC does not accept a USB-C connection, withal, you can use the second option: an HDMI cable and a USB-C to USB-A cable, both of which are also included in the box for your convenience.

It is recommended that you visit the XP-Pen website to download and install the corresponding software for your pen display before yous plug the monitor into your computer. That step lone is the most complicated part of this procedure. Once you've gone through the installation process, you have tin can then load upwards the UI to first the customization process.

From the UI, you have the option to calibrate your monitor so that your pen and cursor placement line up in a fashion that is comfortable for the bending you use your monitor. This is as simple equally tapping crosshairs that bear witness upward on the screen, and it actually is a quick and painless process. The UI software also gives you lot the option to reassign your express keys and rotary wheels to suit the needs of your own personal workflow. The nice touch here is that a few default options are already programmed in for some of the more commonly used cartoon apps, and then if you're not peculiarly fussed, you tin just become with a default setting.

XP Pen Driver UI Source: Windows Fundamental

Whether you're using Sketchable or Adobe Illustrator or all the possible apps in betwixt, you're going to be able to rely on the Artist 24 Pro to work and piece of work well. In that location are minimal pen jitter thanks to a combination of the battery-free stylus and the size of the monitor allowing for large sweeping pen strokes. What lilliputian jitter did exist was piece of cake enough to smoothen out with castor settings.

Yet, it'due south not exactly a flawless drawing feel, as there were instances in Corel Painter 2022 where an odd "fasten" marker would be left at the finish of a stroke after lifting the pen from the screen. I was unable to recreate this issue in Krita, Sketchable, or Realistic Paint Studio, so information technology may be limited exclusively because I was using an older version of Painter 2022. At almost, this was a minor inconvenience where I could just become dorsum, erase the extra spike and keep working. The commuter UI and software are besides frequently updated, then it'due south likely that if this is a driver-related bug, it could be worked out in the future.

XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro: Competition

Xp Pen Artist 24 Pro Laying Flat Source: Windows Central

XP-Pen likes to tout that the Artist 24 Pro is the start 2K resolution drawing monitor of its size; they're non entirely accurate. Huion released a 24-inch 2K monitor in their Kamvas line at approximately the aforementioned fourth dimension as the release of the Artist 24 Pro, and the Huion Kamvas really has the advantage of being fully laminated, whereas the 24 Pro is not. Apart from that, the two monitors are incredibly like, although the Kamvas does have affect-sensitive confined in place of the XP-Pen'due south dials. The two even share the same price point.

While Huion may exist XP-Pen's closest mid-tier or budget competitor, it's the top end that everybody attempts to compare the brand. Is it going to exist the Wacom killer? Concerning Wacom, the XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro has some serious disadvantages, as Wacom's 24-inch device supports both 4K and impact support. Where XP-Pen runs away with the victory, though, is in price. Wacom'south 24-inch pen display with 4K and touch back up comes with a hefty $2200 price tag, where XP-Pen can offer its trimmed down 24 Pro with a 2K resolution and no touch support for a more budget-friendly $900.

XP-Pen may not exist on the path to dethrone Wacom equally pen display royalty, just the Artist 24 Pro certainly is a solid alternative that gives the competition a run for its money.

XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro: Should you buy it?

Drawing on XP Pen Artist 24 Pro Source: Windows Primal

You should purchase this if ...

You are an creative person who routinely "draws from the shoulder" to brand large sweeping lines in your art work.
You lot are creating big, high resolution images that will be used for prints.
You lot don't take the budget for higher priced comparible displays.

You shouldn't buy this if...

You desire a fully laminated screen with no parallax.
You want a 4k brandish.
You do not have a PC or laptop to connect information technology to.

With all of the 13-16 inch pen displays on the market place — including-XP Pen's very own 4k supporting xvi-inch choice — convincing yous to put down over $900 for a large, heavy 24-inch monitor can seem like a hard sell. All the same, there's a practiced reason for investing in such a big cartoon surface.

Smaller displays, tablets, and digitizers are all groovy, but they limit the range of motility y'all tin can use for your strokes. When y'all're limited to cartoon primarily from the wrist, you open yourself upwardly to injury over the long term, and that's why it'south common do for traditional artists to emphasize drawing from the shoulder. Additionally, larger, quicker strokes make your drawings look more confident, and that kind of marker-making is just easier to exercise with a larger cartoon surface.

Not only is the larger monitor a more than comfy workspace to draw on, but the supported 2k screen means your illustrations are going to be nice and crisp, even when viewed at lower resolutions. That's not to say that you can just use the XP-Pen as a 1080p display, withal, because information technology volition become distorted and pixelated if yous try to lower the resolution.

The Creative person 24 Pro has taken over my desktop as my new "daily commuter" drawing monitor, replacing my Huion GT 220 v2. Between the college resolution, pinpoint accuracy of the stylus, and the customizable express keys, the decision to add together this tablet to my workflow feels like a no-brainer.

Now, if we could merely convince XP-Pen to put an eraser on the stylus.

XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro

Bottom line: XP-Pen's Artist 24 Pro pen brandish is an splendid culling to more than expensive devices, providing a professional person level of quality without breaking the bank.

We may earn a committee for purchases using our links. Learn more than.

Future plans for FFXIV

Post-launch roadmap for Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker revealed

The latest Alphabetic character from the Producer livestream has just aired, and it comes with a plethora of news for Last Fantasy Fourteen. This includes plans for updating all the main scenario quest dungeons, improving the graphics, implementing new sidequests, and much more.