This is boring. Don't read unless you really want to know some of what you may experience when getting a current gen tablet PC. You have an easier time. You may find it to be a convoluted hell. I'm just here on a whim attempting to bore you to death.

Getting the dual input, 10-point touch slate/ laptop hybrid and windows 8 to work right has taken many.. many hours. This is a bold new drawing environment with very few people to troubleshoot art related issues issues. Unfortunately I am one of the few, and what are simple issues on the PC takes may take me hours on this thing. Solutions may have been easier to come up with had I been a smarter, more tech savvy person... but alas I am simply a user, and this is my plight.

So here is an example. Perhaps the most severe one, but still a very situational one that still had an impact on my experience that needed immediate attention.

This will basically be a butcher job of posts I've made in various forums and notes I made to myself to send to support teams describing issues in hopes of finding a solution. And be warned, descriptions may be redundant at times. I also have a bad habit of using the word "tablet" to refer to mobile slate devices and digitizers interchangeably. Some may find this information helpful, but I'm mostly putting this down to illustrate what I meant when I said this was a learning experience and what it took to get my Samsung 700t working to an acceptable level... because it really is taking a lot of time as I read, troubleshoot, and communicate issues.


:: Calibration - Trial and Error ::


TLDR version. Samsung and Wacom fucked up pretty badly. Their drivers did not work where you needed them to the most. My solution was ignoring every suggestion and driver version Wacom and Samsung had to offer and instead, after realizing the digitizer hardware for wacom penabled tablet PCs are all universal, going to a completely separate company, Fujitsu, and download their custom drivers after reading how it fixed unrelated issues in the past.




- The Situation -


Although working fine for the most part, there was one nagging issue that made itself apparent when I switched to a larger stylus. Although the snub tipped stylus had no issue, a normal stylus needs to be recalibrated to compensate the length of the new tip. This does not use intuos/ cintiq hardware. It's doesn't offer precise z-axis controls so no angle/tilt/rotation/bearing/ etc. Instead you only get x by y meaning you have to calibrate for the angle you hold the stylus or be stuck with the default setting which is optimized for holding it out at a 90 degree angle... which although is "proper form", is not particularly comfortable if you're used to holding the stylus like an actual pen. It also meant that you couldn't keep the tip of the stylus in the same position and angle it however you pleased and retaining the same position. It does in fact go bonkers randomly straying within an inch of the tip in any random direction if you hold it 1-10 degrees away from the tablet. A non issue for sure, but it does illustrate the inferior hardware compared to intuos and higher. A fact that and cannot be avoided as all tablet PCs share the same digitizing hardware.

Still, it was workable, as any graphire or bamboo indeed is without z-axis controls. There is one glaring exception though. Tablet PCs come equipped with bare bone drivers to make use of the stylus and they have their own calibration points, which you can change any time. Although appearing similar, it is not to be confused with the calibration you set within the wacom driver utility as that is a different set entirely... which caused problems as they competed with each other. This caused some programs to malfunction and the solution was to have the windows set override the wacom set and locking the user out of modifying wacom's calibration coordinates. The problem with this was that some programs, although mapped correctly without wacom drivers installed, defaulted to the wacom set once it became installed... a set that was untouchable.

You see, In the past the issue was that there was no way to change it for those usint the tablet pc/ dual input/ ISD drivers. Wacom didn't give you the option. You had to rely on a specific glitch in order to change it yourself. It has since then been "fixed" when Wacom included the ability to calibrate for wacom independently from the windows calibration. They removed the glitch.

The problem is that... well... their way of changing wacom's calibration points doesn't work, the only update being removing the only way we knew how.

At least, in the current version. Their calibration does work in the other version of the driver, but more on that below.

Just check this out though. It's one out of two drivers available on Wacom's site.

http://www.wacom.com/en/shared/down.....cs-driver-7108

Scroll to....

2. Calibration:
a. [b]Four point calibration looks like it’s calibrating, but it does not. Sixteen point calibration does work. Resetting this can be done through the Tablet PC Input panel.[/b]

This is a huge problem for Sai users, among others who this may effect. In Tablet PCs there are two sets of coordinates mapped to pen input. Microsoft's set and Wacom's set, and you can set them independantly. At least, you used to be able to through an exploit!

example of the environment

If you use the vanilla version you will get pen pressure but you won't have access to any of the wacom utilities like pressure curving, editing your buttons, and the like. You won't be able to properly calibrate wacom's pen coordinate mapping either. To remedy the settings issue though you have to uninstall the ISD driver which leaves you with Microsoft's settings, including it's own calibration set you can access in the control panel.

In this limited mode calibration is mapped properly in all programs, including Sai. You won't have access to most buttons except for the first button being right click (with hover disabled), and there will be no pen pressure, but you can calibrate the cursor to how you hold your stylus with the appropriate offsets without issue no matter what you use.

Kind of useless without pressure and pen settings though so from here you should install the tablet PC drivers from the net. You now have pen pressure and the appropriate utilities needed for better usage of your stylus. You are also now able to set wacom's own points of calibration for programs that specifically call for it - usually art programs.

Having the two sets of calibration points makes itself known in certain situations. For example if you have the desktop or another program active that is following the microsoft set and mouse over a program using wacom's set. If the two sets are calibrated differently, mousing over a program using the other set would show you the cursor in one position, but immediately clicking the screen or alt+tabbing over to the program will make the cursor jump over match the calibration of the other set.

Well... here is where this bug comes into play. You get your settings back, but now you have a second set of calibration points competing with each other. The windows set you can change from the control panel, and the wacom set you're supposed to be able to change in wacom's pen input control panel. You can set the points yourself, but as by their own admission it isn't registering. For the most part it's a non issue. Most things default to the windows mapping which is the set you can actually calibrate. For programs like sai, that specifically calls for wacom's set? There is no way to calibrate it. The Tablet PC Input panel and the tabcal lincal novalidate XGridPts/YGridPts line (to use custom, multi point calibration) in the command prompt only effect window's set.

There used to be a bug exploit that allowed you to change it... details on all of this being found here.

http://fox-orian.deviantart.com/jou.....DATE-224071462

Although the driver works a little better since then, allowing pressure to work in more programs than ever before, it still isn't perfect. The "hold to right click" glitch no longer works, leaving people who still need the calibration trick to make their program of choice work out in t he cold. Although not an issue for normal tablets, most wacom penabled pcs/ monitors have an issue with the actual hardware that causes accuracy jittery on the edges of the screen and wonky mapping between the actual cursor and stylus if left uncalibrated. Unless your hardware works on point right out of the box by (which is rare, if ever) this won't be an issue for you, but in most cases, this has been a known issue for years, even on some cintiqs, so you'd have to step in and mitigate any offset by calibrating the screen yourself.

In my case the cursor is offset 5-7 milometers diagonally... cursor action hiding beneath my fingers. It's not a problem problem in most programs, but it makes sai unusable when it inexplicably makes the stylus jump to this position.

So what is the solution? Well, for windows 7 it would have been be to revert back to older versions of the drivers while for windows 8 there is only one other option. Samsung's drivers are a step back so the only step from here is this. The only other version, circa june 2012.

http://www.wacom.com/en/shared/down.....0driver-1.aspx

Now I can properly calibrate the wacom set of coordinates!

Only now my issue is that for some reason any levels of pressure beyond 255 is registered as MAX. According to the debugger the 1024 levels of pressure were behaving normally... but for whatever reason certain programs adjusted their scaling, maxing at 255 which is 1/4th what the threshold should have been for how hard you pressed. Sure, you chould adjust the pressure curve to make 1024=255, but you can't even adjust curves in this version of the driver! You can in the PC version within tht driver. In older versions you could modify the dat file, but neither option is available here. Though there is this that allows you to use a third party program to modify the curve since the new dat file is incomprehensible.

If you followed these steps you could adjust the curves in theory: http://www.lab.envirex.cz/?page_id=3

... only any adjustments you make to the dat file, from making small text edits, to using this program to adjust the curve, to renaming/ deleting the file itself brought on a replacement of the file in it's original form within seconds... the only solution being to have the property window open for the file or folder with read-only checked and hitting apply the moment you make the change... after a few tries the change actually sticking.

With this you can make it so that your pressure scale 1024 input to 255 output and the other key points accordingly, although culling your effective pressure by 25%, making the beta drivers work for you with calibration intact.

But that is unacceptable.

- solution -

On a whim, after seeing someone use a fujitsu pen interchagebly between this samsung device and the fujitsu t902 and reading about compatibility and other issues being solved by switching to the magical fujitsu driveres I decided to give them a try. What was the worst that could happen? I already did a fresh install of windows 8 for various reasons.

So I Went here: http://support.fujitsupc.com/CS/Por.....pportsearch.do

Selected Notebook PC/ T Series/ T902

Downloaded their Digitizer drivers and voila! It worked! Pressure, calibration, tablet utilities, and all! It's not as good as useful as the PC drivers, It doesn't offer it's own built in curve utility, macro utilities, and setting profiles bound to indivudual pens or programs, but I now got the bare minimum to work!