XPPen Magic Drawing Pad Review: Great Balance of Quality and Affordability for Digital Artists on the Go

XPPen Magic Drawing Pad Review

XPPen has been carving a niche for itself in the digital art space with high-quality, affordable studio digital tablets and displays that match the specs of top-tier competitors like Wacom. The $499.99 XPPen Magic Drawing Pad is the company’s first fully portable, standalone device made for artists, offering strong competition to high-end favorites like the iPad Professional, Surface Pro and Galaxy Pro. In the ongoing quest for the perfect digital sketchbook, XPPen very nearly hits the bullseye.

What we like

Pros

• 12.2-inch touchscreen
• Extremely responsive, no-charge stylus which supports 16,384 levels of pressure
• Great drawing surface
• Matte-finish, low-reflection display
• 3:2 aspect ratio is excellent for drawing
• Long battery life
• Lightweight and low-profile
• Ample 256GB RAM and MicroSD slot
• Good value for money

The $499.99 XPPen Magic Drawing Pad provides superior features, build quality and performance for both art and general-purpose use.

Hardware

The XPPen Magic Drawing Pad is an Android-powered tablet built on a midrange 8-core MT8771 processor with an ARM G57 MC2 GPU. It comes with 8GB of RAM and a generous 256GB of internal storage, plus up to 512 GB more via the MicroSD slot. Those specs are more than enough to accommodate most drawing applications, as long as you do not pile on the layers or use a super large canvas.

What really makes the XPPen Magic Drawing Pad ideal for artists are the extra design touches. The 12.2-inch touchscreen offers plenty of real estate, but the 3:2 aspect ratio makes all the difference. The screen provides plenty of drawing surface with room for the application interface in landscape mode and works as an ideally-shaped drawing slate in portrait.

The display resolution is 2160×1440 at 60hz, with 300 nits of brightness at maximum–enough to make every image look sharp and clear. It works especially well as an ebook reader for prose books, magazines and comics and for displaying reference images for your artwork. The screen offers 109% of sRGB, 82% of Adobe RGB, and 77% of NTSC colors, comparing favorably to many professional devices.

Then we come to the stylus, which boasts an impressive 16,384 levels of pressure to precisely capture the subtleties of the artist’s hand. It uses EMR technology with no battery, no need to charge, and no need for a Bluetooth connection. A single button on the barrel of the stylus switches the mode to erase. The pen is a thin and light, especially compared to the fat-barreled pens that come with desktop tablets, but it is superior to the Surface Pen and comparable writing tools for other Android tablets. 

The matte surface of the Magic Drawing Pad screen is a huge plus. It strikes a good balance between creating friction with the stylus tip and diminishing the sharpness of the display. You have to apply a “paperlike” screen cover to an iPad or Surface or use rubberized pen tips to get close to the effect that XPPen provides right out of the box. Some artists might prefer a bit more of a toothy feel to the surface when drawing, but that is a matter of taste.

Combined with the brightness and resolution of the display, the XPPen offers the best available experience for drawing outdoors, keeping in mind that no tablet device works perfectly in direct sunlight. Palm rejection is good, but you’ll need the lightweight drawing glove, included in the package, along with some extra pen nibs and other accessories, to make it perfect.

As a bonus, the four speakers, the microphone, and the two front-facing 8MP and one rear-facing 13MP camera all perform above expectations.

The XPPen Magic Drawing Pad isn’t up to hardcore gaming specs (and does not claim to be), but the performance is more than suitable for routine multimedia, productivity and entertainment applications. The device connects via WiFi and Bluetooth 5.1, plus the USB-C 2.0 charging port. A headphone jack would have been nice, but adapters are cheap if you need this functionality.

The whole unit clocks in at 499 grams (1.1 lbs), a little bit more with the included case and pen holder. At only .69 cm thick, it fits neatly into any bag or briefcase and is light enough to hold up for hours when reading or drawing. Even under heavy workloads, there was no noticeable heating effect. The device runs up to 12 hours on a full charge, drains almost no power in standby mode, and charges from empty to 100% in about three hours via the included USB-C to USB-C charging cable and power block.

Software

The XPPen Magic Drawing Pad comes with a custom implementation of Android and a few useful included apps. Everything else in the Android universe is easily available from the Google Play store. If, like me, you are new to Android, it takes a little bit of getting used to compared to Windows and iOS. The settings in particular, are fairly bare-bones, and Android applications are often missing features or interface components found in versions built for richer OS environments.

IbisPaint and MediaBang Paint are the two included art packages. I was not familiar with either and did not find them immediately satisfactory, so I opted for the Android version of Clip Studio Paint ($26/year subscription), which I use on my Windows desktop.

Krita, Sketchbook Pro and ArtRage do have Android versions for users familiar with them, but for my money, Clip Studio Paint is really the only professional choice, especially if you make comics. CSP for Android contains all the features of the desktop version and includes the ability of desktop users to import their custom workspace setup, including custom brushes and materials, with one click.

CSP really allows the XPPen Magic Drawing Pad to shine. The superior brush engine showcases the stylus’s sensitivity to brush size, shape and opacity, providing a fine simulation of natural media, especially pencils, pens, pastels and oil paint. 

The software also includes its own configuration panel to compensate for any disparities between the pen tip and the cursor placement on the screen, something that initial reviews of the XPPen Magic Drawing Pad have mentioned but which I did not notice in the unit I tested in early May. CSP also includes a side panel of programmable hot keys and the ability to connect a cellphone as a remote control device for fast, easy workflow.

Using CSP on the Magic Drawing Pad was fun, easy and seamless. There was almost no noticeable lag or performance problems on reasonably sized drawings. Sketchbook and ArtRage also worked well for me in brief tests.

Real-world scenarios

The form factor, battery life, design features, and performance of the Magic Drawing Pad make it a great portable device for digital artists in a variety of situations. It is hands down the best digital art tool for drawing outdoors because of its bright, matte-finished, less-reflective display, especially if you can find a spot with a little bit of shade. Every other device I have tried is simply unusable in bright conditions.

It is also a great tool to throw in the art bag to take to art classes and figure drawing sessions, with one important caveat. The lack of tilt support really hurts when doing quick gestural drawings, where we are taught to turn the pencil sideways to control edges and do fast shading.

The Apple Pencil in conjunction with Procreate or Fresco, is still the undisputed champion at this; even high-end Wacom pens that support tilt and rotation do not provide the same natural, satisfying experience. Can you still make nice drawings without this feature? Of course, but if you are used to having it, either digitally or using natural media, you will miss it.

How about for students and beginners? Again, the XPPen Magic Drawing Pad is much closer in performance to devices costing twice the price or more, at least for doing digital artwork, than it is to tablets at the bottom of the market. At $499, it is worth the extra, especially since it can also be used for ordinary work, entertainment and communication tasks. 

For art pros who do most of their work on Macs or PCs using full-sized tablet displays but need a secondary device on the road, using Clip Studio Paint on the Magic Drawing Pad will get you 95-98% of the functionality of an iPad Pro, Wacom Studio or Surface at a much, much lower cost for comparable specs. It is light and easy enough to throw in the travel bag to take on vacations, trips to the in-laws or conventions and actually do professional work, as well as simple sketching.

The battery life, form factor and simplicity will see you through long plane flights, and the bright screen means you can work outside if you want. For finishing tasks that the Magic Drawing Pad simply can’t handle, just export your sketch or preliminary as a layered PSD, save it to the cloud, and work on it when you get back to the studio.

The form factor, battery life, design features, and performance of the Magic Drawing Pad make it a great portable device for digital artists in a variety of situations. It is hands down the best digital art tool for drawing outdoors because of its bright, matte-finished, less-reflective display, especially if you can find a spot with a little bit of shade. Every other device I have tried is simply unusable in bright conditions.

It is also a great tool to throw in the art bag to take to art classes and figure drawing sessions, with one important caveat. The lack of tilt support really hurts when doing quick gestural drawings, where we are taught to turn the pencil sideways to control edges and do fast shading.

The Apple Pencil, in conjunction with Procreate or Fresco, is still the undisputed champion at this; even high-end Wacom pens that support tilt and rotation do not provide the same natural, satisfying experience. Can you still make nice drawings without this feature? Of course, but if you are used to having it, either digitally or using natural media, you will miss it.

How about for students and beginners? Again, the XPPen Magic Drawing Pad is much closer in performance to devices costing twice or more of the price, at least for doing digital artwork, than it is to tablets at the bottom of the market. At $499, it is worth the extra, especially since it can also be used for ordinary work, entertainment and communication tasks. 

What could be improved

Cons

• Android-based hardware doesn’t support professional apps
• No stylus calibration/configuration utility
• Stylus does not support tilt
• Auto-brightness can be glitchy
• iOS and Windows support better art apps

The software situation is, frankly, the biggest problem with the Magic Drawing Pad, or any Android-based device. Professional-grade apps that run iOS such as Photoshop, Procreate or Adobe Fresco are not available; nor are heavy-duty desktop-based tools like Corel Paint or Rebelle, not that you would want to use them without high-performance hardware. 

The biggest drawback for novices is the lack of a calibration tool. As I mentioned, I did not notice a problem with the pen alignment in the version I tested, but if there had been one, it would be difficult to fix.

The problem for beginners is that muscle memory will soon develop to compensate for the misalignment, making it more difficult to move over to more precisely calibrated equipment at school or in the studio. You can adjust the cursor position using a high-end tool like Clip Studio Paint, but if you are using Clip Studio Paint, you are probably not a beginner. Please, XPPen, build a panel into the device interface to make this easier and maybe add some on-screen programmable hotkeys as well.

Unfortunately, the stylus does not support tilt, which limits its ability to fully simulate the drawing experience in certain scenarios, and the device OS does not have a calibration utility or a way to assign a different function to the button.

XPPen Magic Drawing Pad: The bottom line

The $499.99 XPPen Magic Drawing Pad provides superior features, build quality and performance for both art and general-purpose use. The form factor, battery life and stylus sensitivity are elite. Recommended for any digital artist who can live without Photoshop, Procreate and a few top-end features on their portable device in exchange for great value for money and an excellent drawing experience.

XPPen provided the Magic Drawing Pad for review. Images courtesy of XPPen unless otherwise noted.

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