Review: Veikk A15 Drawing Tablet (10 x 6 inches)

Big thanks to Veikk for providing the Veikk A15 tablet for this review.

Veikk A15 is a 10x6 inch budget friendly tablet that supports up to 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity and comes with a battery-less pen.

The price at the time of this review is around US $50 which is quite affordable for any beginner looking for a graphics tablet. This tablet is sold on Amazon, Lazada SG, Shopee SG, eBay, Aliexpress and Gearbest. Links are below.

The items included:

• Tablet
• Pen holder
• Pen
• Spare nibs and nib remover
• USB-C to USB-A data cable
• Artist glove
• Manual
• Welcome card with driver download link

The design is clean and simple. It's a thin tablet with rounded corners and 12 physical shortcut buttons. The drawing area is a portion of the single surface area that covers the whole tablet.

This ring is actually just for decoration. It's not a dial. And this ring comes in different colours, namely Red, Grey, Gold and Blue. The light indicators are just beside that ring.

The 12 physical shortcut buttons have a firm click to them and work well. They can be configured to any keyboard shortcut, mouse and pre-configured functions (more on that later).

On the back are four rubber feet to prevent the tablet from slipping.

Left handed mode can be selected with the tablet driver. When you turn the tablet upside down, the shortcut button goes to the right. The cable is a reversible USB C so you have have the cable go up or down.

The pen works well, is solid enough but feels plasticky and lightweight.

Two side buttons on the pen can also be configured to any keyboard shortcut, mouse and pre-configured functions.

Veikk is extremely generous with the number of spare nibs supplied. There are so many I didn't even bother to count. That metal piece is the nib remover.

No pen stand is included but there is a pen sleeve.

Driver

The driver must be downloaded from Veikk's website as there's no driver disc included. Functionality for both Mac and Windows drivers are quite similar except Windows Ink functionality on Windows.

On Mac, you can find the tablet driver inside System Preferences. On Windows, you can find it from the Windows menu or desktop.

Pen pressure can be adjusted with a pressure curve. Default pressure works fine for me. The initial activation force is minimal. As long as the tip is on the drawing surface, it would be able to make a really thin line. This is where you can configure the pen's side buttons too.

By default the whole drawing area is mapped to the whole screen. You can also choose to have the pen behave like a mouse. In pen mode, where you click on the tablet will be exactly where it is on your screen. In mouse mode, you're using the pen as if you're using a trackpad.

Left-handed mode can be selected here.

These are the different functionality you can choose for the shortcut buttons. They are quite self explanatory.

Under the Tablet functionality, you can choose these four options:

• Accurate Mode: Allows the cursor to move much slower to give you more precision
• Pen/Erase: Toggle between the pen and eraser in most graphic drawing apps
• Monitor Switch: Allows the mouse cursor to jump from one screen to another screen in dual monitor mode
• Dial Function Switch: No applicable here as there's no dial

Drawing performance

The performance depends on the OS and software used. The drivers I've used here are Mac driver ver 2.0 and Windows driver ver 1.0

Performance in Photoshop CC (Mac) is fine but the line quality really depends on how much smoothing you apply. It can be difficult to maintain a stroke with consistent thickness.

WIth Smoothing at 0%, the stroke can have some jitter to its edges as the pressure varies.

With Smoothing at 25%, the stroke is now smoother. However, sometimes the transition can be a bit abrupt when pressure changes. You could certain increase Smoothing, but there may be input lag – there may be a split second delay before the stroke appears.

Pressure sensitivity doesn't work by default with Adobe Illustrator CC (Mac). You've got to install Wacom Intuos driver to get pressure sensitivity working but that can sometimes cause conflicts with other software.

Affinity Photo (Mac) works well.

Performance with Medibang Paint Pro (Mac) is good. The lines here are smoother compared to Photoshop. The transition from thin to thick is gradual and doesn't have the abrupt transition.

Clip Studio Paint (Mac) works well.

Krita (Mac) works fine.

At the time of review, Photoshop CC (Win) doesn't work with Win tablet driver version 1.0. I managed to get a pre-release driver version 2.0 for testing and it's only then that Photoshop CC works, as in the pen can move the cursor.

Line quality with Photoshop CC (Win) depends on Smoothing. The performance here is quite similar to that on Mac. With 0% Smoothing, it's difficult to maintain consistent line thickness.

With Smoothing increased, there's still the abrupt changes to line thickness as pressure changes. It could be due to Photoshop as other drawing software don't display such issues so easily. But I've got to say that I've used tablets that don't have this problem with Photoshop.

Affinity Photo (Win) works well.

Adobe Illustrator (Win) works well, and pressure sensitivity works without having to install any Wacom driver.

Krita (Win) works fine.

Medibang Paint Pro (Win) works fine.

Pressure sensitivity doesn't work by default with Clip Studio Paint (Win). But the workaround is simple.

You just have to go into CSP preferences to switch on Wintab and pressure will work.

Other drawing software that I've tested on Windows are Sketchbook Pro, Sketchable and Wacom Bamboo Paper. Pressure sensitivity did not work with these three software, even after I toggled Windows Ink on and off. This was tested on the Microsoft Surface Pro 6. When I switched to using the Surface Pen, pressure sensitivity works fine. So it's most likely those three drawing software are not compatible with the tablet driver.

Conclusion

The tablet performs well for drawing with most graphic drawing apps I've tested except Photoshop. So that's the main thing to take note of if the main software you draw with is Photoshop. Hopefully, future drivers will be able to address all the issues with Photoshop in the future.

Overall, it's a decent budget tablet. Design is nice and it works relatively well.

Availability

The Veikk A15 graphics tablet can be found on Amazon and Gearbest. Direct links to the product and more reviews below:

Gearbest | Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp | eBay | Aliexpress | Lazada Philippines | Lazada Malaysia | Shopee Malaysia | Shopee Philippines