Review: Parblo A640 Graphics Tablet (Just US $29.99)

Big thanks to Parblo for sending over this review unit of the Parblo A640 for me to check out. In addition to such graphic tablets, Parblo also make pen displays for artists.

Parblo A640 is a 6 x 4 inch graphics tablet that supports up to 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity. It's priced at just US $29.99 and that's a really attractive price.

That's the packaging.

These are the items included. The manual is included but not shown in the photo above.

There are six replacement nibs and the nib remover.

The braided USB cable has USB C that goes to the tablet and USB A for the computer.

The pen feels solid enough. It's not battery powered so no charging required.

The back has this flat design on one side.

The two side buttons are customisable.

Design of the tablet is simple and nice. The dots on the drawing surface reminds me of those from 2015 Wacom Intuos.

Design of this tablet is symmetrical so if you're left handed you can just out on the side of your drawing hand. There are no driver settings to change for left handed users anyway.

On the back are four rubber feet to prevent slip. There's also a cloth pen holder at the top.

Overall build quality feels solid enough.

6 by 4 inches is considered a small tablet. The drawing area is about the size of my palm.

For drawing tablets, I usually recommend getting at least a medium size tablet, something that's at least 10 by 6 inches. Larger tablets of course are going to be more expensive. This small tablet is just US $29.99 so that's one of the main selling point. The price.

My monitor is 27 inch. When used with my monitor, a tiny movement on the tablet translates to a large movement on the monitor. So it will take some time to get used to the movement. If you're using it on a 13 or 15 inch laptop, the difference between the hand vs cursor movement will be less significant.

Driver

By default, the tablet will be mapped to the full area of a 16:9 aspect ratio monitor.

The pen's pressure sensitivity can be adjusted by the slider. Shortcuts to the two side buttons can be changed here.

This is where you can customise the four physical shortcut buttons.

When you click Reset Customer Defined to choose your own keyboard shortcuts, these are the available shortcuts you can choose from. For some reason, there's no way to input keys from the keyboard. So for example, you won't be able to pick [ and ] to change brush sizes. You have to choose from the earlier menu.

Drawing performance

Photoshop CC (Mac)
Drawing performance is great. Strokes taper nicely, curves are smooth. Lines come out just the way I expect. Performance is predictable and consistent.

Works well with Clip Studio Paint (Mac) too.

With Krita, it's more difficult to control the transition between thin and thick lines. So it's either thin or thick. I don't use Krita very often. I suppose you can tweak the pressure settings of the brushes to get a smoother, more gradual, transition for the thickness.

Conclusion

The A640 performs well as a graphics tablet. For the low price of US $29.99, it's definitely worth the money.

The only thing I do not like is the small size which will take some time to get used to. If you prefer something larger, you can consider the Parblo A609 which supports tilt sensitivity too, or the Parblo A610 with more shortcut buttons.

Availability

The Parblo A640 is available via these links:
Parblo | Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp