Er, so yeah, this thing arrived today! Huion GT-221 Pro; 22 inch Wacom alternative. Meant to draw a few test strokes but accidentally got into it and sat here for 45 mins so... well at least now I have a thing I can say I did on it already :P

Colours need calibrating; this thing is pretty washed out and looks nothing like my (calibrated) monitor. I'll stick the colourimeter on it tonight and hopefully that'll pep it up a bit.

To work with; probably as close to a Cintiq as can be found without having a Cintiq. Textured matte screen means no need for a glove and you're not staring at a reflection of yourself any more. Nice array of hotkeys down each side (mirrored, sadly, not independent). The pen is sensible, and though it does need charging, it states 350 hours per charge so... yeah. Also there's a spare pen, which I thought was the pen, but then I realised the fancy pen box also has one in it. TLDR there is no excuse for moaning about battery issues.

Pen calibration is a little iffy, I had to point above the targets in order to actually line the cursor up with the nib, but some fiddling can definitely get it to a reasonable proximity. There is some parallax, but on the whole it's not that bad. Few places where the screen texture feels a little scratchy, but buffing it over with the supplied microfibre cloth seems to be clearing that up.

Pen tracking; the biggie that I was concerned about. In two words, not bad. It's not quite Wacom grade on slow diagonals, where there is a tiny bit of wander but... it's less than other screens I've tried. If you're doing faster, bolder strokes, it's totally fine. Slow inkers might find it stressful on fiddly details.

After 60 mins of 75% brightness the inevitable warm spot is top centre. Unlike my Cintiq where it is right where I want to rest my wrist and which feels awful on hot days. Lower right is also a smidge elevated, but most of the screen is still cool. Thank you Huion for being the first manufacturer think about this!

Conclusion; I want to work with this thing because it is huge and glorious. It's going to take a bit of getting used to, particularly remapping the hotkeys and the feel of the pen and not having an eraser end and working at a much larger scale, but my first impressions are very positive. Hopefully I'll get a long weekend to settle in with it. Really hoping it's going to gel with me because it is 1/4 the price of a Cintiq 24 Pro and the latter doesn't exist in stores :)

*edit* Post-calibration note: this screen came out covering 96% sRGB, which makes it well suited for web graphics, but less so for print (you really need Adobe RGB for that). It is now way closer to my main screen in colours. Assuming I can adjust to the pen/physical feel, that's basically everything ticked off the list. And it's so (relatively) cheap that it doesn't even matter if it only lasts 12 months!