Take your photos and illustrations in hand with this gloriously large and responsive LCD tablet.

Digital Artists, Designers and photographers need a way to edit photos, draw onscreen, and edit their designs and images. Without a pen tablet, clicking and drawing with a standard mouse can feel cumbersome and imprecise. With Wacom’s gorgeous (and pricey) Cintiq 20WSX, you can banish your mouse and write, scribble, and sketch onscreen with a stylus instead. This 20.1-inch drawing tablet merges a bright LCD with a touch-sensitive surface, giving amazing control in the apps that graphics pros use most. The result feels nearly the same as actual pencils and brushes, but with all the benefits of a digital workspace, like undo, layers, and scripts.

We breezed through setup, planting the 1680-by-1050-pixel display on its sturdy base and installing the included software. We liked the included base’s smooth adjustment. The Cintiq works well as the only display or as a secondary display. After the quick “tap-here” calibration, we tried that configuration in our favorite graphics apps.

In Corel Painter X and Photoshop CS3, the spot-on stylus response gave us delightfully nuanced control. The display tracked our movements across the entire surface, keeping the cursor aligned with the tip. The device registers 1,024 levels of pressure, bleeding a heavy touch wider or darker than a light stroke. Even angled swipes are recognized. The specific app and brush you’re using respond differently to these variables, adding new abilities that a mouse simply can’t touch. Even in Photoshop, brush opacity shrinks with a lighter touch.

The stylus and tablet surface each feature handy buttons. Flip the stylus over, and the eraser end scrubs out mistakes. A two-position rocker switch gives a few other functions, like Control-click. The left and right tablet edges have seven programmable buttons for quick key commands. We were pleased with the rear placement of the scroll-style touch strips on the Cintiq, which kept us from accidentally grazing them. Too bad it still feels slightly jittery and unpredictable.

The bottom line. The Cintiq 20WSX fits all your palettes onscreen and packs enough resolution for detailed work. Pros can easily justify its cost.

COMPANY: Wacom

CONTACT: www.wacom.com

PRICE: $1,999

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.3.9 or later, DVI or VGA connection, USB port

Accurate stylus tracking easily beats mouse control. Pressure- and angle-sensitivity give new life to art applications. Big size provides ample room to work.

Touch strips feel less precise than a simple scrollwheel. Top edge of screen gets noticeably warm in use.