If you’ve been playing osu! and chatting with other players, you’re bound to hear about these so-called “tablets”, and their effects on gameplay in osu!. Tablets are pads that operate with a stylus that connect to your computer. As you hover the pen around above the pad, the mouse cursor moves with the pen, and tapping the pen clicks the mouse. You can think of a best tablet for osu! in the same way as you think of an arcade stick for fighting games, not necessary, but some players prefer it.
Why tablets?
Their original purpose is to allow a greater degree of control in digital art applications, allowing the user to draw or paint on the computer as if they were using a pencil or paintbrush. The biggest difference that a tablet has over a mouse is that it features absolute tracking. This means that every point on the tablet corresponds to a particular point on the screen. If you lift the pen outside of the sensitive range, then put it down on another part of the tablet, the cursor will “jump” to that location. This is opposed to mice, which rely on relative tracking.
The biggest selling point of best tablets for osu! is this absolute tracking. Every other parameter such as pressure levels, tilt sensitivity, barrel rotation, etc. will have no effect on your osu! gameplay. These features are for digital art, where the tablet can sense things such as the pressure you’re applying to make a darker pencil mark, for example. The only specification which may affect your osu! gameplay is LPI (lines per inch).
This is essentially the “resolution” of the tablet surface, or how little you have to move for the tablet to detect it. If a tablet has 100 LPI, then you have to move at least 1/100th of an inch for it to register movement. However, even the lowest LPI should be far higher than any monitor that you’re likely to play on, so higher numbers have a mostly unnoticeable effect on gameplay.
In short, tablets are an optional device to let you play the game in a different way. They were originally intended for digital art, but happen to work very well when playing osu!. Most specifications will make no difference in OSU.
Some of the Best Tablets for OSU
Huion 420
Huion is a tablet company that is the supplier of the osu!tablet. They are best known for being cheaper than Wacom tablets by a large margin but some would say that their tablets feel flimsier and that running a tablet pen over a Huion tablet would feel as if you were on writing paper (in comparison, some say that on Wacom, it is as if you were writing on glass). Their tablet pens either require a battery or needs to be charged, unlike Wacom tablet pens, and their nibs may need to be often than Wacom nibs. Other than that, there really are not any noticeable differences between Walcom and Huion tablets.
VEIKK S640
Last but not least, we have the S640 tablet by Veikk to wind up our list. This one offers a battery-free stylus with a very sharp and exquisitely designed tab, albeit with some drawbacks. Continue down reading to find out more about the S640.
Right out the bat, it is noticeable that the tablet itself has no buttons. Instead, most of the area of the S640 is designated to the drawing surface itself. However, the bezel and circuitry on the left size leave a big notch. For right-handed users, this will not seem like something to lose sleep over; however, left-handed users have an incredibly hard time getting a firm grip. The surface of the tab has very little resistance about it, which makes dragging not really ideal when using this. As far as hovering goes, the hover distance for the stylus too is nothing too out of the ordinary. Therefore, it ends up hanging in the middle of the spectrum.
