The Huion Note is a gadget I’ve been waiting to arrive on the market for sometime. For many years I’ve lamented that the quality of a scanned piece of artwork is low, even with fairly high quality scanners. Inevitably you find dust and artifacts that lead to an image not quite true to life.
There are several digital pens (stylus) and tablet options that allow you to draw directly to a graphics program but these are expensive and not quite the same as a stroke.
Enter the Huion Note.
The device is simple, it’s a pen and notebook set that records the location of your pen. It’s accurate and captures the stroke. It’s not perfect by any stretch, yet. It has a slight delay as to be expected, and if you move the notebook or shift the page it can ever-so-slightly change a stroke location. However the application that runs the pen seems to correct for this which is truly incredible!
Some neat features.
You don’t need to charge the pen. The pen comes with ink replacements, it doesn’t come with a way to charge it. That’s because it runs on battery free electromagnetic resonance which uses a coil in the stylus that acts like an antenna, catching the waves. The electromagnetic field from the tablet induces a current in the stylus’s coil, providing it with power.
You can change the stroke and color, which means that with a single pen you can essentially create anything in your imagination. With some caveats of course, switching between stroke color for images is cumbersome, and for artistic use, it is limiting.
Now for the potential downsides.
The paper isn’t high quality, great for notes and doodles, fine art might leave you wanting for more. There is a grid board that you should be able to use with different paper, but I haven’t figured out how to use that component. The instructions aren’t great, even though it’s fairly intuitive there are unanswered questions.
It’s bluetooth so the security is intrinsically flawed. But if you don’t care that a random company can record every stroke and someone nearby also might be able to tap into your notebook it’s not so bad, I haven’t dismantled the book of course to see if there are other technologies that might be embedded but perhaps someone else might do this!
All in all, I recommend it. For $100 you’ll be able to digitize your notes, create artwork, and the journal itself is high quality.
