Upgrading from a pen tablet to a display drawing tablet not only gives you a superior drawing experience but also ramps up your learning speed.
As a first-time display tablet buyer, you wanna make sure you do this right.
At a really reasonable price of $339.00, the 16-inch Huion Kamvas Pro 16 V2 packs enough punch to compete with much more expensive products on the market.
It’s definitely a quality pen display tablet for artists with lots of extra goodies to boot.
In this review I’ll cover my impressions of the tablet, what you get with it, and how well it’ll work for digital artists of all skill levels.
What’s in the box?
The tablet comes in a simple black box with All accessories include a Tablet stand, stylus, Pen stand, 3-in-1 cable, 10 extra Pen nibs, a black glove, a nib extractor, cleaning cloth, User manual, Warranty card, Shortcut button function stickers and a “Thank you” card.
Build Quality & Design
The overall build of the device is actually pretty good. It has a metal back, and glass front that doesn’t feel cheap at all. The stylus is also lightweight and feels comfortable in the hand.
The overall dimension is also small for a 16” pen display. They made it possible by reducing the bezel thickness around the display. This is a good design choice as it doesn’t eat a lot of space in your desk.
It is very thin, so it is very portable in terms of weight. However, it is unable to fit in 15.6-inch laptop bags because it has more length than 15.6-inch laptops due to the shortcut button area.
If you intend to bring it around with you, you may need to get a 17-inch or bigger bag.
Screen Quality
The 15.6 inch size of the display is a nice balance between being big enough to work on, but not so big that it stresses my arm from making too many large movements.
Having 1080p resolution on a 15.6-inch display is absolutely fine. While drawing – the pictures look sharp and you do not notice any individua pixels even at a closer distance.
A color-accurate screen solves these issues and helps keep your colors looking consistent. A 100% sRGB color coverage is considered the baseline for any color-sensitive task.
With Kamvas Pro 16 V2 you get 16.7 million colors brought by 120% sRGB or 92% Adobe RGB, which can better present the colors applied to your works.
The IPS screen on this tablet has fairly good viewing angles of 178 degree. I tried working with some of my UI design projects using this pen display and didn’t notice any major color shifts when looking at different angles.
The contrast ratio of 1000:1 is good that makes the colors pop and results in better picture quality.
The display has a maximum brightness of 220 cd/m2, which is good enough for indoor uses.
Fully Laminated Screen
Parallax is a common and annoying problem in the drawing process. When you hold the pen to the screen and the cursor is misplaced or offset.
The display unit of drawing tablets is made of multiple different layers all stacked on top of each other. All these different layers make the screen thicker and cause the parallax issue.
This is a normal thing when it comes to pen displays and it all comes down to how small that spacing is between your pen tip and your mouse cursor.
The Huion Kamvas Pro 16 V2 comes with a fully laminated screen. Here all the different constituent layers of the screen are fused together into a thin sandwich.
This improves the clarity of the screen as there are no air gaps in between that minimize the parallax issue and improves stylus accuracy.
Etched Glass Surface
The tablet comes with an anti-glare etched glass surface instead of a low-cost matte screen protector.
The matte screen made a big difference. I don’t have to deal with any reflections from windows or room lighting anymore.
Aside from reducing the glare, this surface has a texture like fine-grained paper, which feels natural beneath the pen nib and allows for that little bit of ‘grab’ that stops the stylus from sliding around on the screen.
Stylus Pen
The Huion Kamvas Pro 16 V2 comes with the PW600A battery-free pen, which looks premium with a nice rubber grip, plastic body, and silver accents.
The pen has a subtle taper towards the top, and a bulge near the tip which makes it very comfortable to hold and use.
The pen buttons protrude slightly from the surface of the pen which makes them very easy to find and use.
It is a newer generation stylus that features huion’s most advanced pen tech 4.0, offering 16384 levels of pressure sensitivity alongside up to 60 degrees of tilt sensitivity.
Thanks to the improvement in initial activation force at just 2g, it starts to draw as soon as you touch the pen tip on the tablet with the lightest of pressure applied.
This also gives you better control over the pressure sensitivity and improves the performance of the tilt brushes.
The strokes have a nice taper at the end, there are no wiggle issues when drawing straight lines.
Overall, there is nothing really to complain about. The stylus pretty much competes with top-tier wacom stylus on the market and produces precise and consistent strokes every single time.
Hotkeys
The six customizable express keys and one touch bar make using the display apart from the keyboard much easier.
They make basic actions, like zooming in and out or changing brush size, much faster.
The buttons give a nice tactile click when pressed, and are not too hard to press.
Tablet Stand
The adjustable & foldable Stand ST200 gives me room to change up the angle I’m working at, which is handy for keeping me from becoming stagnant.
It supports six “different” positions (15, 17.5, 20, 42.5, 43.8, 45 degrees) using 2 metal arms and 3 slots.
Installation
The setup process was painless. It works wonderful on both Windows and macOS.
I plugged in the power cord, the HDMI and USB-A cables, to the laptop, and connect the other end usb-c cable to the kamvas pro 16 V2 tablet. I should add I’m running Windows 11.
I downloaded and installed the drivers right from the Huion official website. A quick Restart and the Huion software allowed me to calibrate the pen, adjust the sensitivity of the pressure, and program the Express Keys with ease.
If you already have another tablet driver installed you will need to uninstall those drivers and restart your machine before you install the new ones. It’s at least a safety precaution to make sure it all gets installed properly.
Color Calibration
The Huion Kamvas Pro 16 has decent screen colors out of the box.
If you are not satisfied with the default settings, you can calibrate the display using a colorimeter, After that, the colors displayed become very accurate as expected.
To access the OSD settings, you have to press and hold the bottom shortcut key (the touch bar function switch button) for about 2 seconds until the button lights up and the OSD settings appear on screen. From there, you can navigate the options using the 4 shortcut keys closest to the touch bar.
To return the shortcut keys to their normal functions, press and hold the function switch button again until the light on it turns off.
There are a lot of OSD options such as: backlight, brightness, contrast, sharpness, gamma, color temperature, hue, saturation, etc. I believe it has everything necessary for editing your screen colours.
If you change some settings and don’t like them, you can always return the settings to default by going to Other>Reset in the OSD settings.
Drawing Experience
Drawing on the Kamvas Pro 16 V2 tablet feels good. I was really impressed with the vibrancy and the clarity of the screen.
I tested the tablet in Photoshop, Krita, Paint Tool SAI, clip studio paint, and illustrator. It worked well in every single art program.
The matte texrured surface gives a little bit of resistance when you slide the pen goes a long way towards an organic drawing experience.
The pressure sensivity is evident specially if you’re a light sketcher like me. It’s easy to get thin controlled lines and pen activation requires the least amount of force on the display’s drawing surface.
The increased pen sensitivity allows you to create more controlled strokes without having to mess with the pen pressure settings using the the software.
The tilt detection function is actually really nice since the cursor always stays under the pen nib even when using the pen from a different angle than usual.
In Conclusion
The Huion kamvas pro 16 V2 comes with everything you can ask for in a pen display – whether it is the beautiful screen, or responsive stylus – this display has got it all.
That said, the display doesn’t support handy single USB-C to USB-C Cable connection, which is widely used in modern pen display monitors.
But considering the affordable price of $339.00– and features you are already getting in this price segment – the tablet gets a pass.
Overall, If you are looking for a no-compromise pocket-friendly 16-inch pen display tablet – look no further and get the kamvas pro 16 V2.
