Boox Note Air 3 C Review

I've only reviewed a handful of eink tablets this one caught my eye because it has a color screen and it can install Android apps so let's check it out hello my name is Brad I review tech for Creative professionals and if you're new here welcome aboard mies I look at Tech from the point of view of an illustrator SL designer so I may not talk about your favorite features but I'm going to go pretty in depth about the pen drawing experience what it's like to take notes on this thing and generally the app ecosystem now if you have been around for a while this is a really different tablet it's cool and it's own way but it's probably not a good fit for most of you this is an e in tablet so it's very different from all the other Android tablets that I have tested around here think of this as like a Sketchbook with Benefits a good Sketchbook it's light it's portable this thing it's only 10.3 in it's great for capturing ideas and practicing but it's not really a great place to create finished polished digital art so it would be great for my learned how to draw in 60 days course but not so great for my intro to digital art course of course bradart school.com oh come on I thought that was a smooth plug the note air 3C is for pencil maybe ink drawing a digital version of that you draw a line you can erase a line and you get some benefits like being able to fill in inclosed spaces or being able to pinch in Zoom which is something I always forget I can't do in a Sketchbook Apple has ruined me the note air 3C fits that bill perfectly because it's crazy thin the battery can last for days and days it comes with a pen it's to draw on and it's a fantastic little digital Sketchbook is it worth the $500 price tag n it really kind of depends on who you are and what you're looking for I've also reviewed the remarkable 2 I've reviewed the Kindle scribe both of those are pretty good digital sketchbooks they compare favorably to this but what puts this heads and shoulders above those for me is the Android App Store don't get too excited though there are some good and bad news points there to understand all that you have to understand what this tablet is this is an e in tablet and they aren't for everyone but they do have some great benefits most tablets display are constantly refreshing their pixels on their screen that leads to some really smooth animation when you launch an app when you're scrolling down a page but that also takes power so when your screen is on the battery is draining on an eink display it sets that picture the image is on the screen and it's not going to refresh the pixels are just off and the effect of that on the battery is ginormous or the opposite of ginormous I mean it's less it's far far less my mom has a Kindle and she swears by it cuz she can load a whole bunch of books on it and then go on vacation for two weeks and the battery just lasts and lasts also because of how easy it is to read in sunlight something that's really hard to do on an iPad but this also means when the screen refreshes you don't get any kind of Animation or effects in fact it's not uncommon to see this screen blink once or twice to like clean off all the pixels all ET a sketch style before displaying any new one it's also not the clearest screen there is some ghosting on here you will see the previous image faded behind some of the icons when you load a new screen it's like a ghosting effect it often feels slower than the tablet really is because we tend to equate smooth animation with good performance so even though this display is color it's not black and white like the Kindle or remarkable too the colors don't pop they aren't vibrant it's just not what this Tech can do in fact you're limited to some for 4,000 some odd colors on this thing and many times what it's doing is it's combining one color to another color in order to create the colors that you're looking for in many apps so color accuracy is not really what it's doing here but if you want a great outdoor Sketchbook that will almost always never be charged boom here you go this is a really good one probably the best one I've ever used so there's no excuse for missing today's assignments on bradart school.com hey I wasn't done fine let's talk about drawing on the Note air 3C one of the reasons this is my favorite eink display that I have tested is that the note taking app is Light Years better than what is on the remarkable or the Kindle scribe although I will say I I don't have either of those devices anymore so they may have updated however those note apps those drawing apps that they had pre-installed were really not feature Rich here it's a different story there's a lot going on now while using an eink display it doesn't feel as responsive as an Android tablet or an iPad does but here when you're in this Notes app there is virtually no lag to this pen at all if I draw really fast and then slow down my camera I can find lag but who who does that I mean other than me real time it's surprisingly responsive now this is a Wacom EMR stylist this is the same Tech that Wacom uses in their Wacom 1 tablets this is the same Tech that Samsung's using for their SP pens so the lines are super smooth there's no wobble here the pressure is really good and generally it's just just a great pen that doesn't have a battery so you never need to worry about charging it now the silus comes with a cute little sock that goes on top of it I just recently learned that these pens can break if you store them standing up on their tips so don't do that or if you just apply too much pressure to the tips so this is really protecting that I learned this all the hard way a few weeks ago rest in peace S Pen Creator Edition now out of the box the accuracy of this pen was spot on for me but if you do need to jump in and calibrate this thing and make it more accurate there are some Cali cration tools in the settings if it ever feels off the notes app itself has a handful of brushes or tools to draw with there's a fountain pen there's a paintbrush there's a ballpoint pen there's the pencil there's the highlighter I'm going to be focusing on the pencil here because I love it almost as much as you would like taking my course over okay okay fine not going to go there on the software side it's not doing anything that a pencil tool has not done like a million times in a million different other apps because this display doesn't have to be super color accurate they can put this super thick rough matte coating on it and dry on that just feels so good this pencil feels rough and responsive and it's just great this is something that I loved about the remarkable to as well and they nail that pencil drawing feeling here too it is the closest thing you're going to find to drawing on pencil and paper without having real pencil and real paper just listen to this sound and if you want to take dots digitally this is the way to do it there's no extra looping there's not too much smoothing and I just feels so natural and organic when I'm just writing something down I feel like I can move faster when I have more control and that's why this just feels so good this Notes app also has layers something the Kindle lacks it also has undo buttons it has an eraser the Eraser is only probably the only negative part about this whole thing while the pencil is fast and responsive the Eraser is slow and it's really hard to be accurate there's a line erase mode this is really nice for note- taking because you could just like scrub over part of a word or of a letter and it's going to just take out that entire letter for drawing not so much especially if you have like a really rough sketch it's not sure what part of the line it should remove or what area of the line it should remove so when I say this is good for rough sketches as opposed to finish artwork that eraser really plays into that pretty heavily it's just not quite as responsive not nearly as responsive as what you might find in other drawing apps now the layers that are here are pretty basic you can turn them on and off there's no real transparency or anything like that so if I was going to go about creating a sketch and then putting some finished Line work on a separate layer above it probably what I would do is i' I'd change the color of the pencil I'm using first that's because if you use a Black Pencil and then put like black line art over that it's kind of hard to see what is pencil what is line art look kind of weird so it takes a little bit of thoughtfulness and planning ahead on my part now there's a lot more to cover in the native Notes app there's like a basic bucket tool there are some basic gestures you can pick attention Zoom Hallelujah you can attach files to this like images and audio clips and there's like all sorts of templates and grids there's a lasso tool there's a shape tool for a Notes app it seems pretty feature complete to me although I will say I am not a notes nerd I just kind of scribble down what I'm thinking for drawing app it's not quite as feature complete however it is far beyond what I found on the remarkable in the Kindle even the image exports are pretty good you can't save layered files here but it kind of flattens everything out you can export a PDF a bitmap a PNG I think it was the Kindle when I reviewed it it compressed The Living Daylights out of things and made them all jaggy it was weird when you tried to export anything off that device but wait there's more remember how I told you with the top of this that it can run Android apps that's the thing that makes this like super powered but with great power comes great responsibility and uh not so small amount of lag I loaded up some of my favorite Android drawing apps here we're talking about clip studio artlow ibz paintx and they work surprisingly well the pen lag though here is just Just Killer where the notes app is designed to be like super responsive with this pen and ink e display these apps were not designed to ever be used on anything like this and it shows it is hard to make Lines line up or really know how accurate that you're being there tends to be okay for like quick sketches but far less suited for more finished line art because it's just too slow so I would say these apps are okay for sketching like quick rough sketches but then again if that's all you're going to be doing just do it in the notes app it's better this is also an area where color might really hold you back too even though this is a color display exporting these images to another device shows how crazy inaccurate and how off the color representation you thought you were getting is to what it's actually showing up on the screen I mean even the color Pickers are kind of wonky so that's a dead giveaway for drawing apps the Google Play Store might not be all it's cracked up to be I do love that they're not afraid to open this device up to it let's face it the reason the Kindle is popular isn't for its features but for its ties to the Amazon ecosystem it is really easy to buy a book and just have it show up there and the remarkable is a much weaker device for closing itself off to all that here you can go to the Google Play Store just load up the Kindle app and it works great audible yep there are speakers for that not good speakers but it's fine for listening to a book or a podcast again not the poppiest colors but if you want to read digital comics in the beach or in the Sun is pretty much the only way to do it you can even load up the YouTube app on this thing again not ideal but it it does work all right some lightning round stuff just random stuff that I noticed about this I wanted to throw in this video at first when I woke this thing up every single time it was so slow so it turns out it was completely shutting itself down after 15 minutes and then you have to hold the power button for a few seconds and then it takes like 15 20 25 seconds to like boot up so you could do anything with it those were the default settings so what I did is I went in and I disabled power hour and I was able to get this thing to go to sleep every 5 minutes and then with a quick tap of the button it will wake up instantly and it'll only turn off when I say hey you should turn off now now earlier in this video I said that the battery can last for days but the word can is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence this display also has a backlight now this is great for like indoor reading or drawing or that sort of thing also nighttime reading it's almost impossible to read in a no light situation on like a device without a backlight it is worth point out that that backlight is a pretty large drain on the battery a significant drain you're going to lose a lot more battery power with that on than you will if you keep it off so is this worth getting for illustrators probably not this is pretty expensive it's currently $500 and while I love how that pencil feels it feels so good on that screen this device itself is is pretty Niche at least for the illustration Market while there are benefits being able to draw outside that battery life the nice pen the pencil feel for most of you you're going to want to use those great Android apps and the performance just isn't here the color accuracy isn't either and this isn't really a replacement for an iPad or a Galaxy tablet oh there's the bell I can talk about my course learning to draw in 60 days go at your own pace you can go faster you could go slower every day there's a new lesson there's new homework each lesson Builds on the previous lesson so pretty soon you go from drawing really basic stuff that anybody could draw to more advanced stuff this is really designed for begin people who want to get into art but aren't sure where to start check out Brads Arts school.com for all the details so much more there anyway thank you for watching and I'll talk to you in a couple of [Music] days

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 135,837

Keywords: tech, technology, art, illustration, drawing, wacom, ipad, apple pencil, procreate, review

Id: 12xF4FIFAt4

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023