XP-Pen Deco 01 v2 Unboxing & First Impressions

this video is sponsored by squarespace today i am looking at this this is the xp pen deco 01 v2 an affordable little drawing tablet from xp pen that costs between 60 or 70 dollars and gives you a lot of bang for the buck hello my name is brad i review tech for creative professionals and today i am doing a quick video a little unboxing first impressions of this little deco tablet if you want to see other tablets like this that i have reviewed i have a list of them over on my website bradcowboy.com and this time of year a lot of products like this kind of slip through the cracks because i'm reviewing new ipads and phones and things like that but i wanted to cover this because it's affordable and it's a nice little tablet but i don't have time to do a full review but i wanted to talk about it anyway so here we have the box of the deco 1v2 i'm just going to slide off this cover nice little design cover it's designed to look like an x while it's sitting on top of this nice blue box here just a simple blue box opens up this way and we have our little mascot greeting us how am i gonna get this out i gotta just pull on the plastic a little bit so this is the device itself right here it appears that it comes with a screen protector we're gonna take a look at that in a minute what else comes in the box we have uh this little donut which is not actually shaped like a donut this is a little square thing let's get it open try not to rip it but i guess i'm gonna have to rip it and basically what this is is a stand for your pen i'm gonna set that down really not carefully at all we have the pen itself so we can stick that in there just like that or we can put it in sideways so if you prefer to have your pen sitting there like that probably looks better on camera that way we have all of the connections we need in this little bag let's go ahead and open this up and i can show you everything that comes in here oh no i see a drawing glove oh no so first off we have our cable this is usbc which will plug into the tablet itself uh usbc to usb a uh so that is just a standard usb thing we have our our warranty our little yeah that's another warranty thing a lot of extra nibs in here whoo little little baggie of nibs so don't lose those that was something i was going to look into and then we have some adapters so this is a usbc to usba and they actually give you two of these adapters which is these come in handy if you get a newer computer that doesn't have the old usbc connectors and then of course what else do we have in the bag we have our quick guide which is going to tell us how we're going to get set up this also works with android devices which i'll be checking out in a minute here so it has the description there obviously and i thank you for supporting card and then just a quick start guide and this is going to just kind of explain how the tablet works in various languages so you can get it set up and working so let's take a look at the tablet itself all right so let's bring this in to the picture gonna set those aside for now let's get this out of the bag first thing i noticed is how incredibly light this is this is like weighs almost nothing also these bags oh my gosh they're easier to rip than they are to get the the sticky glue off come on you could do it you could do it this is mesmerizing unboxing stuff i'm just gonna rip it off sorry [Music] and there we go and we have our please remove to protect before using so let's go ahead and pull that off there we go now as expected what we have here is a nice textured surface what's kind of cool here is this textured surface isn't just in the drawing area and the drawing area is kind of marked by these little whites you know side markers here but this kind of spreads the whole thing gives it a nice elegant look this is better than i thought it would be got a little textured section over here these are going to be our shortcut buttons there's like a little line on this one and a little dot on this one so if you're looking ahead towards your screen and you're just trying to feel your way it does give you like a little indicator so you know which button your hand is on which is kind of handy let's see if we can find the connector yeah there is our usbc port along the back is just a large plastic back and then over here we have some rubber feet which is going to be handy when it's sitting on your desk you don't want it sliding around while you are drawing so let's let's take this pen for a test ride here okay that feels good that's one thing that these tablets can do that a lot of screen tablets can't do is they can give you a slightly better texture a screen tablet can't do that because i mean it does give you some texture like that matte texture but it never quite feels as good as these because that texture you actually have to be able to see through so they can't texture it too much or else you you lose some of the blacks and you lose some of the contrast and colors on the screen and after drawing on it a little bit let me apply a little more pressure oh that's cool the other thing i like to look for when i'm drawing on one of these is does it scratch up and after drawing pretty heavily i'm not seeing i'm not seeing any scratches so this is this is good material now if you are worried about that there are some options for you here it comes with this screen protector and let me open this up because this might provide us again with this super sticky [Music] tape this might provide us [Music] with a uh a rougher surface so if you want even more texture yeah i think that's exactly what's gonna happen you can line it up you can peel it off and it gives you another texture or oh that is even rougher wow how about that i'm gonna draw on this really quick oh that's rough yeah i think i prefer what's actually on there but it's good to know that they're giving you that option so one thing that i did miss when i was unboxing is at the bottom of this this twists and i think you can uh somehow twist it open i think i've just twisted it tight uh but this thing actually opens up oh my goodness [Music] there we go i got it open if you open it up if you wanted to you could place your extra nibs in here so that they weren't in that little plastic thing anymore and they'd be really handy to keep here i want to thank today's sponsor squarespace you already know that squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a professional website online store or portfolio but you can do so much more once your site is set up you can grow and engage your audience with squarespace's email campaigns create powerful email content that matches your website with your existing products blog posts and logo so that your messaging is consistent and effective schedule messages manage your email list and even set up automations all within squarespace squarespace's easy to use interface head to squarespace.com for a free trial when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com brad colbo to save 10 on your first purchase of a website or domain now one of the cool things about this that i want to touch on a little bit is that yes you can plug this into some android phones and some android tablets and use this as a drawing tablet and so you can get really light lines you can get really heavy lines you get that pen pressure and some of the other features i wanted to test this out with a couple of apps and just kind of show you what you could expect from this android experience so this is infinity painter what else do i have on here let's go ahead and check out autodesk sketchbook i feel that all of these work pretty well i'm not getting the pen pressure quite as much in autodesk let's go ahead and see if we can get a different pen here and maybe i can feel the pressure a little bit more light lines yeah so pen pressure is working great an autodesk sketchbook you know line quality looks just as good as it does on the desktop so that's pretty cool one thing you will notice is you do have to point your tablet in the orientation that your phone is in i'm going to jump over to another app here so we can play around a little bit with some different brushes so this app is called artflow works pretty well light pen pressure heavy pen pressure now something that i find is it's probably going to depend on your phone or tablet but the orientation is a little wonky like if i try to draw a perfect circle and i don't look at my phone i just look at my tablet i can tell that circle is being stretched out because i think my phone is longer than this the proportions are a little bit off and unlike using this on a pc you can't there's no settings app so you can't go in and modify anything it's what you see is what you get so if this fits the orientation of your tablet or phone perfectly you're good to go everything's going to work great if not you're going to have to kind of draw more oval shapes if you want to get like a perfect circle or if you want to draw a square you're going to have to go a little bit wider than you would think you have to the other thing to be aware of is that the shortcut keys i want to say they don't work but i have pressed them in some apps and various things happen as you can see i'm pressing it here and i'm getting things happening i'm not sure why as you can see i accidentally turned on the voice assistant i don't know how to turn it off this is one of those frustrating things where all they really give you to go on is how to plug this into the tablet it doesn't give you you know a really good description as to how this actually works so i think the android stuff is cool i think it's a cool idea but for the most part a lot of this stuff is just going to be trial and error all right so here we have the tablet it is all hooked up and it is all working and one thing you will notice if you use any xp pen device is the drivers look the same and more or less work the same on this screen we can come in here and we could set up the buttons on our pen over here we could do all sorts of other things like we could actually flip this around if i tap and hold you're going to see my pressure curve depending on how hard i press on the pen tip so you can see all 8 000 levels of pressure sensitivity how hard you have to press in order to get all of that pressure our pressure curve over here if this was a monitor tablet which it's not you would see your which monitor this is attached to um we can change the offset and things like that so if you don't want to draw on the sides you can come in here and do that sort of thing the tablet area is very similar we can come in here and shrink it down and then i would only be drawing on certain parts i don't want that i think i've messed up everything hold on can i fix it [Music] okay i fixed it express keys are probably the most important thing to me you can go into each and every one of these express keys which are labeled here and i have these top two set to brush size and then zoom and undo and and that sort of thing which is all i really need it for and then there's an about screen which just tells you which version of this that you're using so i'm going to go to my layer and i already have my document set up i'm going to use my zoom keys to zoom in and i'm just going to check my pressure here on my brush and it's looking pretty good the other thing i am noticing here is that overall this is a very smooth feeling pen i'm not getting a lot of jitter on this pen or anything like that overall feels exactly the way i would expect it to but that is not good enough so let's go ahead and test this thing out i'm going to do slow angled lines and i'm detecting a tiny bit of jitter but that could also be my hand but what this is going to tell me is how smooth these lines are i do want to know if these lines are because of my hand shaking which is entirely possible or whether it's because of the pen so i like to put down a straight line and just come in here and this is looking crazy smooth that looks really good i can detect a tiny bit of jitter on that but this is well within the acceptable range in fact this is this is looking much better than i thought it would the other thing that i like to test on here are quick dashed lines just to see how these perform how the taper works um you see occasionally it'll lose the signal that's what happened on this one that's why you got a straight line and then an angle the other thing that's happening on many of these is these faster lines is you're getting a tiny bit of shoe stringing so if you do these really fast hatch lines um sometimes the taper isn't exactly as accurate as you want it to be but just using this pen for the little bit that i have played with it i feel like it's holding pressure well and overall for the price of this tablet and what you're getting is pretty good now it's fun to do these pen tests but you really can't get a feel for a tablet until you actually start drawing on it so let's grab a uh like a pencil brush type thing and let's come in here and i also want to point out i am absolutely horrible at drawing on this sort of thing i'm so used to drawing directly on a screen and this is something that does take a little bit of time to get used to especially if you're used to drawing on paper or drawing on a screen tablet coming to something like this where you're drawing down here but you're looking forward uh trying to figure out hey where's that pen gonna land it could take a little bit of time and it's something that definitely takes getting used to i'm better at this than i used to be but i'm still much better you know when i'm looking at a screen because usually i'm drawing on you know a wacom tablet or an ipad or something like that but overall i'm feeling pretty good about this this this looks kind of the way i want it to i do have my undo button here so if i'm like i don't like the way that looked i can always undo it and come down here but for sketching i feel like i'm getting the accuracy i'm looking for and once you do get used to this it can be a you know very nice drawing tablet here so those are my impressions of the xp pen deco 01 v2 i would say that i've used wacom stuff i've used huion stuff this is on par with what huion has right now i like the size of this i like the price of this this is still significantly cheaper than what wacom has when you look at what wacom has though i feel like the pen is better i've said this on a lot of xp pen reviews still holds true here but when we're talking about just a tiny bit of line wobble and that sort of thing i don't think it's that big a deal for the amount of money that you're saving for sixty dollars you're getting a fantastic little product so what do you think let me know down below in the comment section thank you for watching and i'll talk to you in a couple of days

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 197,886

Rating: 4.9329052 out of 5

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

Id: tCTm2J4lo1M

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/digitizerstylus]

TL;DW:

• Works on Android, Windows, and Mac. Android support is okay but incomplete. Windows and Mac support is good.
• Texture is good, comes with a rough screen protector for even more texture (maybe too rough)
• Pen is good.
• Lines are good. Barely any wobble on diagonal lines. Fast strokes sometimes skip.
• Good size for the price. Comes with lots of extra nibs, pen holder, artist glove, USB A to USB C plugs and cable.
• Fantastic product for $60