Review: Huion HS611 drawing tablet has tilt sensitivity and supports Android

The Huion HS611 is a drawing pen tablet released in early 2020. It supports up to 8,192 levels of pressure, 60 degrees tilt sensitivity and can work with Android devices as well.

Price at the time of this review is US $79.99 from Huion's online store. Amazon US has it too and it's sometimes on discount.

This tablet is available in three colours: Coral Red, Starry Blue and Space Grey.

The packaging box here shows the red model even though it's the black one in it.

Items included are

• USB-C to USB-A cable
• USB-A to USB-C adapter
• USB-A to micro USB adapter
• Instruction manual
• Artist glove
• Pen stand with 10 replacement nibs
• Pen (PW500)

These are the adapters to use to connect the tablet to your Android device.

The PW500 pen is lightweight but has solid build quality. It's comfortable to hold with the large rubber grip. It's not powered by battery so no charging required.

This pen supports tilt sensitivity and up to 8,192 level of pressure sensitivity.

There are two side buttons which are customisable to various shortcuts. The pen nib will retract slightly which is the typical.

The small pen stand included allows the pen to rest horizontally and vertical. You can unscrew the bottom to reveal 8 replacement nibs.

The active drawing area is 10 x 6 inches. This is a good size to work with, and is the size I always recommend.

There are 10 physical customisable shortcut buttons on the left. The buttons are smaller than many other tablets I've use but thankfully they are big enough to locate and press accurately, and have good feedback.

There's a touch-sensitive stripe at the top of the tablet. This left area with the long line allows you to swipe left and right to make adjustments, eg zoom, scroll, change brush size. The touch stripe doesn't work with Mac driver 14.5.0.201120 but works with 15.2.5.464_beta. Windows driver works fine.

On the right side are pre-programmed touch-sensitive shortcuts. There are controls for volume, media playback, switching between apps (Alt+Tab) and showing the desktop (Win Key + D), and these controls only work for Windows.

I like to place my tablet like this and I find that my wrist would accidentally touch and activate the top right touch-button way too often.

There is the option to enable or disable the physical and/or touch sensitive buttons, but for some reason the functionality to turn off the touch sensitive button doesn't work (with Win driver v14.8.166.1482 and Mac driver 15.2.5.464_beta)

And because that particular button is actually the Win Key + D keyboard shortcut, on MacOS, that actually is read as Cmd + D which can be different shortcuts depending on situations, e.g.

1. With certain browsers, Cmd + D is bookmark a webpage
2. With MacOS Finder, when a file is selected, Cmd + D is to duplicate the selected item

The touch buttons that adjust audio, media playback work on MacOS too.

There's a little sleeve on the side to hold the pen.

On the back are 4 rubber feet at the corners.

The tablet is thinner than the pen included.

All the corners are rounded off nicely, and edges are beveled.

The design with the dots/speckles/star dust or whatever that's called. The dots sometimes reminds me of dust so I guess dust can blend in well with this design. A cleaner design without the dots would probably look nicer.

Driver

The tablet driver has to be downloaded from Huion's website.

I've tested both Mac and Windows driver from Dec 2020 and they work well generally except I wasn't able turn off touch sensitivity, and on MacOS the touch-sensitive buttons don't work as they should.

This is where you can customise the two side buttons. With the Windows driver, you can move the two dots to adjusts the pressure curve.

The ten physical shortcut buttons and the touch stripe can be configured here.

These are the various shortcuts you can assign to the physical shortcut buttons. Switch Display is for switching the cursor between multiple displays and Switch Brush is to toggle between brush and eraser.

Left handed users can change the orientation of the tablet here. The USB cable uses USB-C so you can reverse the cable to point upwards.

Drawing performance

Lines come out just the way I expect them too. The pen is accurate. Pressure and tilt sensitivity work great. Drawing performance is consistent and predictable. I did not experience any glitches or strange behaviour. This is true for various drawing software I've tested on both Mac and Windows.

Photoshop (Win)

Clip Studio Paint (Win)

Medibang Paint Pro (Win)

Krita (Win)

Photoshop (Mac)

Clip Studio Paint (Mac)

Medibang Paint Pro (Mac)

Krita (Mac)

Android support

When I connected the tablet to my Android tablet and phone, the cursor does not appear. When I click with the pen, some things were being clicked but because you can't see the cursor, you can't click on what you want to click.

Anyway, Android support with drawing tablets is always a hit or miss. I don't recommend getting any tablets to work with Android because there's no way to confirmed if it will work properly with your device.

Conclusion

The Huion HS611 is a well built drawing tablet with fantastic drawing performance. The design looks okay – I don't like or dislike the look of the tablet.

I'm pretty sure you will be satisfied with its drawing performance if you choose to get it.

Pros and cons at a glance
+ Good build quality
+ Excellent drawing performance
+ 10 physical customisable shortcut buttons
+ Pen not powered by battery
+ 8 replacement nibs
+ Support for tilt and 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity
- Design looks okay
- Touch sensitive controls can't be turned off (driver issue)
- Android support hit and miss

Availability

You can find the Huion HS611 and more reviews via these links:
Huion online store | Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP)