Remarkable 2 Review

this video is sponsored by squarespace this is the remarkable two gotta be honest didn't expect to like it as much as i did let's check it out [Music] the last week of november i got four things in the mail to review and this out of those four was the thing i was least interested in this is the remarkable two now i review tech for creative professionals mostly illustrators designers so just looking at this it wasn't something that was really on my radar as a great art tool it didn't check any of the boxes for me i bought one because a lot of you were asking me on the comments and on twitter hey it has a pen can i draw on it what do you think and i thought okay i'll check it out so why wasn't i interested well it's a black and white e-ink display unlike an ipad or an android tablet you don't have a whole bunch of art apps out there that you could go and download for it you're stuck with what they give you it doesn't seem as snappy or as powerful as other tablets either at least when you see the demonstrations of it and it's pretty expensive for what it is there was no way that i felt i was gonna be able to enjoy using it but boy was i wrong handwriting on this thing sketching on this thing well it's really remarkable it seems like every tablet maker out there says it these days it feels like drawing on real paper and we've heard it so much that we just say yeah yeah yeah but here it actually really truly does feel like you're drawing on paper it's an amazing sensation so let's start with an unboxing and then you can see in real time my reaction when i drew on it for the very first time we have our pen fairly light but a little bit weighted feels very good it's got a little bit of texture to it uh holds well in the hand it feels a lot like an apple pencil if you've ever held a apple pencil it's about the same amount of weight it's got some texture to it this is a fantastic feeling stylus it's well weighted it doesn't feel like too heavy in the back it is a little back weighted maybe but no that that feels great that's fantastic uh what else do we have here it says marker tips so let's pull this open and that's exactly what we have some really some nice uh nicely packaged extra pen nibs that we can then replace on our pen so cool that was good let me put this back and let's go back to our tablet and we could write on it like it's telling us to let me get this stuff off here and i'm gonna say hey every one wow that's pretty cool so my first initial impressions just writing on this is that it really it feels like paper which is a weird thing to say because i'm used to drawing on textured screens that are designed to feel like paper and this does have a textured screen but i think it's more than the textured screen that makes this feel like paper what's most important here is that this looks like my handwriting when i draw on paper when i draw with almost everything else that i've ever used as a tablet you kind of have to find the right brush in order to emulate your handwriting like you'll be writing and it'll just get super loopy so i'll go to draw v and it'll look like a u whereas this it feels very feels very good so if i just sign my name yeah that looks exactly the way i would write with a pencil so i don't think it has as much when i say it feels like paper it feels like paper partly because of the brush and the experience of the letters appearing underneath it and less so because of the actual you know texture on the screen though that feels good as well all right i gotta stop it there i also got a sleeve that you slide it into but that's a little boring for the two minutes it took for me to talk about it so mystery to me is that drawing and writing feel what did they do to make it feel so good why does it look like my handwriting on the remarkable it looks just like it does on paper and everywhere else is it the pen latency well the pen latency is really good they got it down to 21 milliseconds so it is very snappy you can barely see any space between the tip of your pen and where the line appears behind it now i take a lot of notes now most of the time when i'm taking notes i'm taking them on my galaxy note phone which also has really really low latency and it's absolutely fine for that but that handwriting it doesn't feel as natural as it does here little things like it's the bend to the l's or my o doesn't close exactly these are these are tiny little details but those little things those gaps really leave a mark on and really leave a gap between the perception of writing and having to kind of train your brain to write on this digital object and because of that no matter what device you use whether you're writing or drawing there is going to be some kind of learning curve if you've been drawing or painting traditionally so would it be the accuracy it is a very accurate pen but so many of the other ones that i use whether it's a wacom or whether it's the ipad they're just as accurate is it the smoothness of the line well maybe some pens are a little bit too sensitive they pick up every little wobble of your hand especially like when you're drawing with the stylus on a little glass screen that's definitely something i feel with wacom's erm especially on like phones and tablets and laptops that use it so it is up to the apps to smooth that out that's something you'll see like procreate does pretty well it's got this smoothing feature on the brushes but what that ends up doing is if you hit a sharp angle and you're writing quickly that angle isn't like perfectly sharp if you were just drawing on a piece of paper it softens that a little bit it streamlines that a little bit and that creates a more loopy feel while you're drawing so it doesn't exactly feel like this is my handwriting so i think it really nails that line between streamlining it just a tiny bit so it's smoother and it's not picking up every shaking of your hand but also keeping enough in there to make it feel real there's one other thing that really helps us out and that's the screen texture now there's nothing special about the screen texture itself wacom displays are made of etched glass they've been doing this forever a screen protector for your ipad it's going to accomplish the same thing those textures are no different than the texture they're using here but that in conjunction with the way they design the brushes pulls this off so well now before we get to the next one i would like to thank today's sponsor squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is your all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business i like being able to see how many people are visiting my site and what content they're most interested in with squarespace's built-in analytics i can quickly see page views traffic sources time on site most read content audience geography and more get feedback on what's working and how i can improve my site go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com bragg colbo to save 10 on your first purchase of a website or domain let's take a look at the hardware we've got a 10.2 inch e-ink screen if you're not familiar with e-ink it's black and white so we have no colors here but the upside is the battery life is crazy good and i mean crazy this will last weeks and that's not just like hey we put that on the box that it'll last weeks it actually lasts weeks since the screen doesn't need that much power to be on so the downside to the way the screen is designed is the interface isn't as buttery smooth as what you might be used to using on your phone or tablet and i'm sure when i demo it here it just doesn't look fluid it doesn't look as cool and as modern as what you'd expect on most devices that you see nowadays i think of this as kind of like a digital etch a sketch but instead of shaking it to erase the screen it turns black for a second and then it redraws itself this kind of lag or this gap really comes into play when we're talking about undoing things if you're drawing a lot and have a bunch of little hash lines and you want to undo if you tap that button really fast it's it's not super responsive you see the screen blinking and thinking and that sort of thing it's it's not great for that sort of thing and i have been spoiled by using things like the ipad and android tablet so it was something that i had to get used to speaking of android and ipad there aren't apps per se on this device just a handful of things are already built in that you can do you have a notebook you have pdf reader and you have an ebook reader and that's about it the interface for each of these is the same there's this line along the side that has all your tools in it drawing erasers undo's that sort of thing what i really gravitated towards obviously were those drawing tools you got pens markers pencils highlighters since this is a black and white display the tools are more limited by what you can do compared to their real-life counterparts but for the most part they they get the job done the pencil tools are the ones that i found the most fun since those felt the most like real life pencil on paper you get the full range of what you could take advantage of in real life for example you have the pressure sensitivity of the pen apply more pressure get you a thicker line and you also have things like tilt and the pen does that really well too now most of what you do with this device is facilitated through the desktop or mobile app you can upload documents to it or you can download what you've created off of that using the app whether it's for your phone or on a pc and also i probably wouldn't use this in real life but for the sake of testing i did play around with the handwriting recognition and i thought it was surprisingly good so the real question here is is this for you probably not those things i mentioned at the beginning mean that even though this is an incredibly great sketch pad you can't really go past that stage all you can do here is sketch whereas on any other drawing device you can take your work so much farther color texture you choose the size your resolution of your document you can export in different formats for different uses you could just do so much more and as salo bez said it's on twitter when we were talking about it if paper is the gold standard why just not use paper then yeah i think you pretty much nailed it you don't need a device just for sketching if you love sketching on paper sketch on paper snap a photo of it with whatever device you plan on finishing on i do see a ton of value here for note-taking and having all of that stuff that you'd normally just hand write available to you digitally it's great if you're a student or a high-flying business executive but if you're an artist or illustrator it's probably overpriced for what you're gonna get out of it but i will say if you ever get the chance to borrow somebody's or try it out anywhere do it just because i words cannot do justice to the feel of this pencil i don't know any other way to to kind of explain it that it really truly feels amazing to draw on i hope what others take away from it whether it's apple or samsung or even app makers can look at this and say how can we recreate this feel on other tablets if this is the gold standard of what a pen and paper should feel like digitally how do we recreate that so what do you think let me know down below in the comment section thank you all for watching and i'll talk to you in a couple of days you

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 689,067

Rating: 4.8643484 out of 5

Keywords: tech, technology, art, illustration, drawing, wacom, ipad, apple pencil, procreate, review, remarkable, remarkable 2

Id: MIwc2iE8qpA

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/digitizerstylus]

TL;DW: excellent pen experience, expensive, doesn't do much