Huion H610 Pro v2 Review

It’s been a long time since I’ve come on here, which is a bummer considering I’m an editor here, but to be honest I haven’t been very motivated to write stuff. It seems like every idea I’ve had already exists somewhere out there on the internet, done by people far more experienced than I am, and it sucks. Well, not anymore! Moping around not writing anything is stupid. Let’s talk about art for a minute.

~~~~~

I’ve been an artist for almost my whole life, and have gone through many phases of skill and technique– I’m still going through many phases even now. Usually I do either traditional sketch art with paper and pencil, or digital with drawing programs, but leaned more towards traditional. Trying to draw digital art with a mouse and keyboard is the perfect recipe for an ultimate disaster rage-quit when even your best lines look like a drunkard made them. Not that pencil sketches had their own troubles to contend with, but at least I could make my lines smooth. However, just recently I decided to finally buy a drawing tablet, more specifically the Huion H610 Pro v2 graphic drawing tablet— and let me tell you, it is SO much better to use this for digital art, full stop.

I had my mind on a drawing tablet for a while now, considering I always loved to draw digitally yet was so constrained by a dumpy little mouse and keyboard. My one friend had a drawing tablet that worked really well for him, but it was something completely out of my comfortable price range for a drawing tool– I needed something that was reasonably priced yet sturdily made for my first tablet. That’s when I found Huion’s line of products, and settled on the H610 Pro v2 simply because it was only $59.99 new (or $60, as common sense dictates)! It also came with a battery-free tablet pen, a connector, and extra pen nibs… and the instructions, of course. Another selling point was its compatibility with android devices (OS 6.0 and above), which made it a bit more flexible and I’m personally a fan of flexibility just in case I need it. Many people had reviewed this particular tablet positively online, which gave me the go-ahead to buy it and I haven’t regretted it so far.

I suppose this will be a pretty thorough review for the Huion H610 Pro v2, also known as the Inspiroy H610 Pro v2 amongst other Huion products, so I’ll divide it into three extensive sections: the physical tablet and pen functions, how the tablet works connected to regular computer functions, and how the tablet works connected to a few art/photoshop programs. If you don’t want to wade through the bulk of it though, I’ll have a tl;dr at the bottom for a quick summary and my overall opinion.

Tablet and Pen

As mentioned above, the tablet package comes with a tablet pen, a pen stand containing extra pen nibs, a mini-usb connector, and a few instruction booklets. The tablet itself is 9.5″ in width by 14″ in length. It has a drawing space of 6.5″ in width by 10″ in length, which is actually a rather large drawing space for my purposes. It also has 8 hard buttons on the side and 16 soft buttons lining the top of the drawing space. The pen is on average half an inch in diameter and is 6 and 7/16ths inches long including nib. The mini-usb connector is around 3 feet long (which is plenty of cord in case you need more room between computer and tablet) and comes with adapters in case the usb at the end doesn’t cut it– one micro-usb and one usb type c. The instruction booklets contain the quick start guide in 14 languages and how to connect the tablet to an android device booklet in 7 languages.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

My desk space is a little cramped, so the only way I can comfortably fit the tablet on the desk is if the keyboard is moved up onto my computer box, but it doesn’t bother me in the slightest aside from a slightly unstable and noisy keyboard. As I’m right-handed, the hard buttons are arranged on the left side for me, but it can easily be configured for left-handed people through the tablet’s software settings. I use the hard buttons very often and they’re my zoom, undo, and other painting buttons, but I’ve turned the soft buttons off simply because I’m weary that I might accidentally set them off while drawing, and I’m rather prone to doing that if I’m not extremely careful. All of it is very intuitive for me, and makes my work very seamless. When it’s being used, there’s a green LED light that lights up in the corner (top left if right-handed, bottom right if left-handed), which is a good indicator of making sure everything’s working properly. The tablet is very light and easy to move around, but it’s also sturdy and stays in place with rubber feet when you need it to be steady.

The tablet pen is also very light and fits comfortably within my hand, aided by a rubber grip. It has two buttons that are mostly intuitive to use, but I prefer not to use them because as I draw I rotate the pen almost constantly and, again, would rather not accidentally press the buttons all the time on accident. The pen has an extensive tilt function which makes it very lifelike when drawing, which is a huge plus. Replacing the nib on the pen is very easy, just use the bottom of the pen holder to remove the old nib and then replace the new nib by sliding it back into the pen.

The setup uses a magnetic surface to translate the pen strokes into digital strokes, which does raise a bit of concern with me– being careless with other magnetic objects around it could potentially ruin the tablet’s field over time. However, it doesn’t seem to be a huge problem if you just carefully handle both the tablet and pen.

I connected the tablet to my android tablet once to test out its android compatibility, and it definitely worked, albeit with a fair amount of lag. It’s not the fault of the drawing tablet though, it’s the fact that my android tablet is rather old and crummy. If I want to fully use the tablet’s android functionality I’d have to buy a new android device for it to get it working properly, which is definitely not going to happen anytime soon. Alongside that, I don’t use the micro-usb and usb type c adapters, but they may have their use one day so I’m definitely keeping them (even if it’s just for other things, haha!).

Software Functionality

The quick start guide gives instructions on how to download the drivers necessary to work the H610 Pro v2, which are provided by Huion on their website. It’s a fairly simple process to download the file, unzip it, and install it. Once it’s installed you just have to plug in the tablet and you’re almost ready to go.

• 

• 

• 

You’ll probably have to go into the tablet’s settings to configure all the buttons to your liking, as the defaults may or may not be what you’re used to– I had to change the undo function from “Ctrl+Shift+Z” to “Ctrl+Z”, I believe. You can also configure the buttons on the pen, and test its sensitivity and pressure levels. The tablet pen offers 8192 levels of pressure, which doesn’t mean much to me in the tech way but it roughly translates to more accuracy when doing various pen strokes. Finally you can change how the tablet’s drawing space is mapped to your computer, which is simple for me but I can see it being useful if you have a double monitor setup and only want it mapped to one of the monitors, or something similar.

To be perfectly honest, using the tablet and pen with regular window browsers and navigating the computer is a bit of a hassle for me, though it 100% is able to click on things, drag them around, double-click, right-button, etc. I didn’t buy the tablet for regular computer use, I bought it for its pen properties in art programs, so I can’t exactly tell you whether or not the pen is more useful for certain computer functions than others other than “it works just fine if you’re patient with it.”

Art Program Compatibility

• 

• 

• 

Huion claims that the H610 Pro v2 is compatible with all mainstream digital art programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Gimp, Krita, Clip Studio, and more– which I don’t doubt in the slightest. In fact, it seems to me like any software that accepts tablet software/hardware would accept this, but don’t take that for fact since I haven’t tested that out in detail yet. I prefer Krita for my main artwork and Gimp for anything else, and the tablet works wonderfully on both. The pen movement is smooth and natural and has zero lag whatsoever, and all of the buttons work perfectly as intended with my own settings (after correcting the shortcuts in both Krita and Gimp, which you may have to do for your art program of choice as well). This ease of use allows me a lot more flexibility with what I want to do with my art, whether I’m coloring in a character or creating a detailed texture. It honestly feels a lot more professional using the H610 Pro v2, and I’m so glad I bought it. I’ll be updating my commissions page with pieces created using the tablet, and I’m sure you’ll notice the difference in quality and detail between the tablet-created ones and the ones created without it!

In one Amazon review (which was super, super helpful in deciding whether or not I should buy this tablet), the reviewer said that they considered its lack of multiple configurations for multiple softwares a con, albeit a very small con, but I personally have no qualms with it as I prefer simplicity. I can see how if I were to use the 16 soft buttons it would be a bummer, as it would be useful to set multiple functions to each button depending on the software you’re using, but I don’t use the soft buttons therefore I don’t care much. However, this may be a bigger detriment than I realize– I’m kind of an amateur/intermediate artist at the moment.

Summary/TL;DR

In short, I love the H610 Pro v2. It’s simple, intuitive, flexible between computer types, and fits well on my desk. I’ve had an absolute blast drawing and experimenting with it. If you’re looking to buy your first drawing/graphics tablet or something simple, definitely buy this! Only $59.99 for the v2, sometimes even cheaper. It’s a really good investment for only $60, especially since people apparently have many issues with other tablets such as the ones from Wacom. You can buy the H610 Pro v2 from the official Huion website and on Amazon. I don’t have a scoring system for these reviews, but if I had to give one, I’d say AT LEAST a 9/10 based on my needs as an artist. If you do get this tablet, let me know what you think! There may be tons of feedback out there on the web right now, but that doesn’t mean new feedback isn’t valued!

See you in the next post!

 

– Stella