Review: Acepen AP1060 Graphics Tablet

The review unit was provided by Gearbest.

The Acepen AP1060 is a 10 by 6 inch wired graphics tablet that comes with a battery-less stylus. This is one of many drawing tablets that I've reviewed over the years. Graphic tablets like this are becoming so common and affordable. This tablet is currently selling for less than US $55 on Gearbest, at that includes free shipping to Singapore.

These are the items included. The tablet, disc with driver, pen, 8 replacement nibs, nib remover and USB cable.

The design is simple. Build quality is sturdy.

The drawing surface is matte and has a nice tactile feel when drawing.

On the side are 8 physical shortcut keys that you can customise with your own keyboard shortcuts.

The shortcut keys are firm, maybe even a bit too firm, and silent when clicked.

On the other side is a clothed pen holder.

The pen is plasticky but feels solid enough, and feels nice in hand. There's no rubber grip but the matte texture on it is slip-proof even for sweaty hands.

These are the 8 replacement nibs and the nib remover.

Gearbest does provide a 1 year hardware warranty, but I'm not sure who you can contact if you have issues with drivers, or some other software-related problems.

Driver

The Mac and Windows drivers are on the disc provided. If you don't have a disc reader, You can download the driver from AcePen's website.

Unfortunately for me, my disc reader is spoiled so I wasn't able to install the Acepen driver. I remembered from my review of the Acepen AP 2150 that drivers from other brands might work so I downloaded the driver from Ugee. I downloaded the driver for Ugee HK1060 Pro, installed it, and found out that it did work.

On Mac, driver installation is straightforward. In the end, I did manage to install the Acepen driver as well and from what I can see, it's exactly the same as the Ugee driver.

On Windows, driver installation wasn't as smooth for me. I had one computer that already has some graphic tablet driver installed so I wasn't able to install the Acepen driver because there's a you-must-uninstall-that-other-driver dialogue box that keeps appearing. I wasn't able to find that other graphic tablet driver though. Eventually, I succeeded in install the Windows driver, but only because I have another Windows system at home.

This is where you can map the drawing area to your computer's desktop.

The tablet supports up to 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity. Unfortunately with the Ugee driver that I installed, I wasn't able to change the pressure. Changing the settings to light or heavy made no difference. The default pressure setting is too sensitive for me. I keep getting thick lines even though I drew with light pressure and want thin lines.

This is where you can customise keyboard shortcuts for the physical shortcut buttons. I accidentally discovered that I wasn't able to set the button ] as a keyboard shortcut. Ctrl+] works but ] doesn't work. Anyway, I am not able to test if I can set all the different shortcuts.

If you don't want to set your own keyboard shortcuts, you can choose from the list of pre-defined functions available.

This is where you can change the settings for left handed mode.

Drawing performance

The drawing performance below are based on the Ugee driver, which is similar to Acepen driver.

Pressure works with Photoshop (Mac). The default pressure setting was too sensitive to me and in Photoshop, I keep getting thick lines.

Krita (Mac) works well.

Pressure is supported in Affinity Photo too.

Medibang Paint Pro (Mac) works well.

The last Mac app I tested was Adobe Illustrator and pressure sensitivity did not work. I tried installing the Wacom driver as a workaround but pressure still did not work.

On Windows, the Ugee driver had more problems.

Photoshop (Win) pressure sensitivity does not work.

Medibang Paint Pro (Win) has tendency to produce angular lines when you want them to be smooth.

Krita (Win) works well.

Sketchable (Win) does not have pressure sensitivity.

Autodesk Sketchbook works well.

Conclusion

On the Mac, I had less issue. On Windows, there were so many problems. I went online to do some research and many of the reviews on Amazon were quite positive. So I'm not sure if it's a problem with my Windows hardware.

Anyway, another issue I have is with the pressure sensitivity, more specifically, the inability to change the pressure sensitivity.

Buying relatively unknown brands can be a hit or miss so I recommend you do more research. The graphic tablet market is huge and extremely competitive, so you have a lot of other options to choose from. I've also reviewed many on my blog. You can check out more reviews on the product page on Gearbest at https://www.gearbest.com/graphics-tablets/pp_697614.html?lkid=14740660