Testing Methodologies
Over the years, I've done contributions to testing tablets and pens, along with collating data and making speculations. Of course, this is not an article saying whether some testing methods are bad, or which are good, or even what should be used or not. A reviewer has the freedom to choose what they want to do to their review and what they want to show and hide from their audience.
Now, why am I even writing this article?
Well, I have thought of many many testing methods, some which do not work, and some which have worked great! To some extent, I've been thinking whether I've reached the end of the road here. There's not much else to test. In some way, I think there's not much else that we can test in a tablet which relate to real world performance. Drawing or playing osu, it's like there's no more need for testing methods. Yes, there definitely can be improvement on some, and even standardisation, but I don't expect any of it, especially as consistency isn't going to be achievable across different testing environments, and remember, there's always that human aspect.
Over the years, there's really been a big push towards a more objective form of testing. 7pens and Kuuube were the ones who really pioneered it, making methods which can be repeatable and most importantly, not just based on empirical data. Sure, you can say a pen feels great to draw on, but if we don't know the max pressure it can reach, can we really say it's a 'great' pen? And everybody experiences things different. Not saying that empirical data is not good; it's rather good, and it could be argued as the best data you can have before making a purchase decision. Still, there's always that void of objective data which pretty much all reviewers do not fill.
Here's the list of testing methods I've contributed to:
Pressure jitter
Temperature variation*
Pressure scan rate**
Max pressure consistency measures***
Holy, look at those asterisks! Gotta love 'em!
Pressure jitter was I think the first thing I thought about testing back in late 2023, where I was first conversing with 7pens. My first 'contribution' I'd say to tablet knowledge. The method was really simple, and it consisted of something holding the pen up at a perfectly still position. I don't think pressure jitter was much of a thing that was discussed about, after all, you wouldn't notice it at all, especially with smoothing in most drawing programs. The amount of jitter I found on a general basis was quite minimal, around +-0.5% at most, pretty much undetectable I'd say. On another hand, I did find pressure smoothing on pens like x3 elite. Funny mentioning that because it seems to have some kind of weird threshold where it would jump to a new pressure level once out of that range. Although this was a foray into objective measurements, I don't think it was useful at all, and all too niche.
Temperature variation was something that a bilibili video mentioned and tested. I didn't really look into it much, nor did I do too much testing with it. It's not something that I would bother even measuring, hence the asterisks.. The most I would do is say yes or no if someone asked me if a pen had temperature variation. This should only happen to pens which are glorified LC oscillators. Think old pens. Temperature can change the capacitance of you guessed it: capacitors. This causes the LC oscillator to resonate at a different frequency, thereby affecting the pressure characteristics. Overall, I really don't care about actually testing this. It's something that all glorified LC oscillators should have, and based on that, it's not hard to figure it out.
Ok, now onto pressure scan rate. I'm still working on this one. It's probably never going to have a definitive answer since nobody knows what's going on with these Hanvon Ugee tablets. Their first gen in house digitisers have this issue. Not sure about their second gen ones, but it seems to be fine. More so, I would say this is less of being actually a problem with pressure scan rate, hence the asterisks. What I noticed from whacking the pen multiple times on my Ugee UE12 is that it only happens when the start position is outside of the hover distance. I don't know how this would work, nor how to test it. Kuuube once did test it with measuring time between reports on his Xencelabs tablet, but I don't think that really means anything. His result of 40hz is more than enough for even the toughest of quick hatching strokes and fast dots. I don't think people are going to have the pen activated for less than a 25ms interval while drawing. Still, I'll work on it on and off over time, but I don't think I'll be making a definitive statement on this anytime soon.
What else... ah yes, my latest idea, not really testing methods, but still. There's never really been an objective measure of pressure consistency for pens. The asterisks are because I only worked on measuring consistency of grams force at max pressure, not the entire curve, which I don't really know how to do, probably a mean could work? Doing only max pressure is a lot easier for my monkey literature major brain. Anyway, you just collect the max pressure data of many of the same pen and get the standard distribution. Then, you find the mean and divide it by that standard distribution so you can get a number that can objectively represent the pressure consistency of a pen when accounting the max pressure. The higher the number, the better. Not sure how to explain it too well.
Anyway, that's my contributions to tablet testing. :) Now, what's next?
Not much really. I'm not really into doing the testing anymore. I'm more interested in seeing how these tablets work and figuring out that Huion spreadsheet of mine. The methods have been exhausted in my opinion, and unless there's the off chance that there's a weird new issue that requires some new form of testing, the testing methods will just remain as is.
7pens did say at some point that tablets will just be so good some day and that there's no need for testing them anymore because all of them would be on par with one another. My personal opinion on this is... probably not happening. There's always going to the one-off, or maybe even a bad tablet, but we don't know until we test. Maybe there's more to test when we reach that time, but who knows. Maybe we just have less to test, but what I think is that there's different things to test.
Apart from just the max pressure measurements, I think max pressure consistency will play a big role. It's an indication of quality control and assurance, and I think that's the most important thing that we should be focusing in the time being. There's nothing worse than getting a pen that's perfectly functional and not a defect, but with a pressure range that is unexpected. Consistency is key.
And that wraps it up. Testing methods are always evolving, and the data sets keep getting bigger.
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