Wacom Cintiq 20WSX Interactive Pen Display.

My Wacom Cintiq 20WSX Tablet Display officially arrived last Wednesday.

I got the call from the sales agent late Tuesday afternoon. Early on I was getting pretty anxious on when the unit will arrive because the agent had to move an earlier estimated delivery date to a week later. That was a bummer at first, but he made up for it fast by nailing the second delivery date.

I picked up the unit that Wednesday morning at the store in downtown Calgary, whose traffic flow is very much like Makati, with all the confusing alternating one way streets. Confusing to me because I rarely ply that route.

The box that the unit came in was pretty large and heavy, almost as big as the box of the Mac Pro, so I had to do some substantial lifting. When I opened the box, the packaging was what I expected from Wacom: very neat and orderly.

There were three main items in this big box and one that I needed to take out first was the box containing all the accessories such as cables, driver CDs and the power brick.

Next up was the Cintiq stand, which I had to take out first and place on my table.

Now here’s where the benefit of reading the manual first before doing anything else comes in: the stand is spring loaded and had I not read the manual, I could have tinkered with the levers of the stand out of curiosity, inadvertently activating the springs and injuring myself and damaging the equipment.

I pride myself in being not the typical male who shuns manuals and does not read instructions. Reading the manual first before proceeding in doing anything else saved me from a lot of self-inflicted harm on expensive equipment and self on many occasions.

Once the stand is firmly in place, I then took out the main pen display unit itself (which had a substantial weight) and mount it onto the stand:

When mounted, I can adjust the incline of the Cintiq using two levers in the stand behind it. I can also rotate it in any desired position; it will move on the stand’s bearing hub. The thick cable that powers the unit is mounted at the very center at the back of the unit and centers nicely in the hub, thus allowing for almost 360° of rotation as long as the unit is inclined not more than 25°. I have mine inclined at almost 45° so I had to move the feet of the stand at almost an inch from the edge of my table to give the unit some clearance anytime I rotate it.

Before I can use it, I had to install the Cintiq as an LCD monitor first. The video card on my Mac Pro supports dual monitor displays, so I can still run my 30” LCD monitor and have two monitors running simultaneously.

Once I figured out that I can plug the DVI-I connector of the Cintiq to the DVI-I connector of my video card and plugged it into the power brick and to an available UPS outlet, I was able to turn it and the Mac Pro on. I also had to make sure that the Digital/Analog (DVI/VGA) switch on Cintiq was set to Digital.

The Mac Pro immediately recognized the Cintiq as another display and had set it up in extended mode by default. I had to use my mouse first to move between monitors and set the resolution of the Cintiq to its optimum setting of 1680 x 1050 pixels because OSX had it set up to a different one at the onset.

Now that I have the LCD monitor function of the Cintiq working, I now needed to install the Pen Tablet drivers so that it can fully function as a pen and tablet. Once I plugged the USB connector into an available USB port on my Mac Pro, I proceeded to install the drivers. Instead of using the driver that came in the CD, I downloaded it from the Wacom site, ensuring that I have the latest driver version. I already had another Wacom Tablet plugged into this Mac Pro and installling the Cintiq driver just added another device on the Wacom Tablet section in my Systems Preference.

Once the driver was installed, I calibrated the pen display tablet to precisely align the screen to the location of the pen tip.

And that’s it! The Wacom Cintiq 20WSX was up and running in no time:

I shall post my first impression and review of the Cintiq on my next post.

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