Anyone have experience with Surface Pro 4 and/or Surface Book?

[Winter_Wolf]

I am entertaining the fantasy of getting one of these for explicitly the writing directly on the screen and running Smith Micro's Manga Studio 5 EX, and I want it to run smooth as butter, so to speak. In reality things probably won't go down like that, but sometimes playing pretend getting fancy electronics is all that keeps me going. The dedicated gpu of a Surface Book seems nice and the greater pixel count helps, but an i7 in the Surface Pro probably is really all I'd need.

I have a tablet for my laptop, but it doesn't get me where I want to go very often or very well. I'm aware I could get a really sweet desktop for the same money but I need portability and I'm specifically trying to avoid getting a gaming computer since I don't have time and can't pretend I won't procrastinate if I have gaming as an option.

[Alent]

I am entertaining the fantasy of getting one of these for explicitly the writing directly on the screen and running Smith Micro's Manga Studio 5 EX, and I want it to run smooth as butter, so to speak. In reality things probably won't go down like that, but sometimes playing pretend getting fancy electronics is all that keeps me going. The dedicated gpu of a Surface Book seems nice and the greater pixel count helps, but an i7 in the Surface Pro probably is really all I'd need.

I have a tablet for my laptop, but it doesn't get me where I want to go very often or very well. I'm aware I could get a really sweet desktop for the same money but I need portability and I'm specifically trying to avoid getting a gaming computer since I don't have time and can't pretend I won't procrastinate if I have gaming as an option.

I only have a Surface Pro 3 i5, but I use Clip Studio Paint Ex and find it quite smooth for Illustration, and I draw at 7000px x 7000px. Bigger brushes sometimes lag a touch, but it has to go pretty big or be pretty intense to hit that point. (some of Redjuice's brushes at 500 px hit that spot)

I expect the Pro 4 i7 or the book would be amazing.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I don't have any Surface, but I have a Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro (aka ATIV Tab 7) with an i5 and an Intel HD4000 GPU. If you're alright with whatever form-factor the Surface you're looking at has (I'm not a big fan of kickstands), I'm pretty sure that the hardware in them will be enough for quite smooth writing or drawing experience. You better always keep the charger at hand though, you don't get laptop-level hardware into a tablet without paying for it in battery life.

[Swordsmith]

I have a surface pro 3, and I'm sorry I got it. I thought I could use it for CAD drawing, but it turns out the screen is touch sensitive and that there's no way I can figure out to use the pen without constantly screwing everything up by accidentally brushing the screen with some part of my hand. Meanwhile, it's tiny... I use it on a dock, with a real keyboard and a real monitor, and use a trackball for drawing purposes. Rarely, I take it off the dock and use it as a laptop with it's (available for more money) plug in keyboard and mousepad. Almost never I pull the pen out of its sad little silicon holder and use it to click on a very small dot where I need the precision.

Now I'm sure there are people who need the precision more often, and who are willing to take the time and effort to figure out how to work it so they don't have these issues. But personally, for me... my stepson's $200 Acer Aspire would have been a better buy, rather than the nearly 2K I put into this machine for features I don't use.

And maybe somehow the 4, or the book, eliminate the problems I have. But I'm currently in a "fool me once shame on me" mode on that.

[Flickerdart]

I have a surface pro 3, and I'm sorry I got it. I thought I could use it for CAD drawing, but it turns out the screen is touch sensitive and that there's no way I can figure out to use the pen without constantly screwing everything up by accidentally brushing the screen with some part of my hand. Meanwhile, it's tiny... I use it on a dock, with a real keyboard and a real monitor, and use a trackball for drawing purposes.
Really? Weird. I have the Pro 3, and the palm rejection works perfectly fine for drawing. The size is also quite good - very similar to a piece of paper, and almost the same size as the largest Wacom tablet available.

Have you installed all the updates? Some people disable the background update processes because at first glance it looks like they just waste power, but the device has gotten a lot better since launch.

[Winter_Wolf]

This is all good stuff. I've had trouble in the past with my trackpad on my laptop picking up random palm contact, so that's a little concern, but if I'm going to be using the pen most of the time then maybe it's possible to turn off the finger/hand contact function like with disabling a trackpad? I'm not trying to replace my laptop for everything, and I can use my mobile for checking email and messaging. The size relative to paper is a huge draw for me (oh damn unintentional pun), but I do worry about pressure levels, since I'm used to 1024 from my old tablet. It does matter, since I like to use brushes a lot and do pressure sensitive stuff. I wouldn't have thought that there was a big difference, but time has proven different for me. If I remember the pitch, the Surface Book has the greater pressure sensitivity, but I probably can relearn that stuff if it saves me hundreds of dollars and doesn't impact my technique too much—and probably won't if I'm doing more with tones and line art. Maybe the 2016 batch will be a little different.

[Alent]

I have a surface pro 3, and I'm sorry I got it. I thought I could use it for CAD drawing, but it turns out the screen is touch sensitive and that there's no way I can figure out to use the pen without constantly screwing everything up by accidentally brushing the screen with some part of my hand.

Have you considered a Smudgeguard glove (http://www.smudgeguard.com/)?

Without it I find that I tend to rest my stylus a touch too far above the screen for the palm rejection to work, but with the glove, as long as I keep the screen clean I have no problems.

[Sean Mirrsen]

If I remember the pitch, the Surface Book has the greater pressure sensitivity
If it's boasting more than 1024 levels, don't bother thinking of it as a positive, it just won't matter for any practical purposes. :)

One thing you should look into having, however, is tilt sensitivity. If you're used to a Wacom Intuos, the added inaccuracy of the stylus not being able to tell which way it's tilted is going to throw you off a lot. (speaking from experience there :P)

On that note, if you're looking into a pricey thing like the Surface 4 anyway, maybe see if the Wacom Cintiq Companion 2 would be to your liking? It'll definitely deliver in the art power department.

[Icewraith]

I haven't had it for long, but so far I have been very impressed with the Surface Pro 4.

No issues so far with palm rejection. It always knows where the stylus and eraser ends are when they're close to the screen, and I regularly pan and zoom with my left hand with the stylus in my right hand hovering over the screen and my right hand resting on the screen.

Dedicated eraser end on the stylus. So easy! So natural!

Only thing is I'm coming into the land of digital art after years as a sketchbook/margin doodler. I was absolutely thrilled with Sketchbook Pro at first, and then I hit some weird bug where it collapsed all my layers if I started a new project. I may ask for a refund and get some different software if they can't fix this bug. Randomly losing my layers is not acceptable, and after having them, I can't go back.

Also, bonus- after drawing deformed Toucan Sam instead of a parrot (parrot requested) three times in a row: "Hey Cortana, show me a picture of a parrot."

Oh, right. Also I was getting the colors sort of right but sticking them in the wrong places- the first 40 parrot pictures had most of the colors I was using but never where I was putting them.

The surfaces are fairly pricy, but the upgrade to the i5 from the base model isn't too bad, and it's almost exactly what I need in a replacement for my aging laptop (the intel 520 graphics built onto the skylake i5 benchmark somewhat better than my laptop graphics card, although I haven't actually tried any games I use my laptop for with the Surface yet- if you want to regularly game on the surface you may want to spring for the i7 for the 530 graphics), with the added bonus that I get to art. Once I get the drawing software thing figured out.

I did hit two incidents with the surface itself. One was I had a minor heart attack when it wouldn't wake up after a sleep, the next step is to hold down the power button for a period of time, my only problem was I didn't know the Surface required a full 30 seconds of button holding.

The second was the stylus pen end stopped responding after about ten hours of use. The eraser end still responded, so I checked what the battery life was supposed to be and found out it was way longer than what I had done so far. I had been briefly horrified at the thought of how many AAAA batteries I was going to chew through. Opening the stylus to disconnect the battery and reinstalling the battery resulted in everything working fine again, and I have not had a repeat of either of the issues so far.

[Alent]

If it's boasting more than 1024 levels, don't bother thinking of it as a positive, it just won't matter for any practical purposes. :)

One thing you should look into having, however, is tilt sensitivity. If you're used to a Wacom Intuos, the added inaccuracy of the stylus not being able to tell which way it's tilted is going to throw you off a lot. (speaking from experience there :P)

On that note, if you're looking into a pricey thing like the Surface 4 anyway, maybe see if the Wacom Cintiq Companion 2 would be to your liking? It'll definitely deliver in the art power department.

On that note, the surface stylus doesn't do tilt at all. It's my only complaint about the surface.

[Swordsmith]

My display area (surface pro 3, mind you, perhaps the 4 or book are larger?) is about an inch shorter than a piece of American typing paper, and about two and a half inches less wide (or vice versa if you use it widthwise, which I normally do). I'm also a middle aged blacksmith, so that, to me, is at an uncomfortable level of tiny, too large for reading glasses yet small enough to be a little blurry without them. I recognize that that's very much a personal issue, of course. But it is at best two thirds of a sheet of paper, and more like a third of my monitor, which isn't even a big expensive one, almost a sheet of paper tall and slightly more than two wide.

I have not tried much to help with the unwanted hand sensitivity issues, I'll have to look into that. I stabbed around at it a little when I bought the thing, and then decided I didn't have time to fool with it as I needed to be doing actual production. Now that it's winter, and with your advice, I'll try some more. I remember it really seemed like a good idea when I bought it.

[Icewraith]

The pro 4 is the same overall size as the pro 3 but with a bigger usable screen. The screen is about 3/4" shorter and 5/3" narrower than a standard sheet of paper, bigger than the 3's 1"x2.5" shorter mentioned above.

GPU wise it's expected to run most older games acceptably, anything within the last year might give it issues or run on minimum settings.

[Winter_Wolf]

If it's boasting more than 1024 levels, don't bother thinking of it as a positive, it just won't matter for any practical purposes. :)
I think the difference was along the lines of 1024 on the high end of pressure sensitivity vs 256 or maybe even as sad as 128. Something painfully low, anyway.

One thing you should look into having, however, is tilt sensitivity. If you're used to a Wacom Intuos, the added inaccuracy of the stylus not being able to tell which way it's tilted is going to throw you off a lot. (speaking from experience there :P)
Bwahahaha. Intuos, man I wish. I am and have been rocking the same old Graphire 3 that I got almost 12 years ago. No such thing as tilt sensitivity on that thing.

On that note, if you're looking into a pricey thing like the Surface 4 anyway, maybe see if the Wacom Cintiq Companion 2 would be to your liking? It'll definitely deliver in the art power department.
Well now, well now, well now. That was not something that was on the market last time I looked at Wacom's Cintiq line. Seems like it could be a contender. Sadly, I don't have any shops around here that would allow me the option of seeing and fiddling with it before committing money to it.

[Flickerdart]

The pro 4 is the same overall size as the pro 3 but with a bigger usable screen. The screen is about 3/4" shorter and 5/3" narrower than a standard sheet of paper, bigger than the 3's 1"x2.5" shorter mentioned above.

GPU wise it's expected to run most older games acceptably, anything within the last year might give it issues or run on minimum settings.

Surface 3 has a 10.8 inch diagonal. Surface Pro 3 and 4 are 12.3 inch diagonals - considerably larger devices.