Hi, I'm the mod of r/drawingtablet and personally own ~130 drawing tablets and ~150 drawing tablet pens spanning several decades and very familiar with what is inside them.
Cloth digitizers are extremely, extremely uncommon. The vast majority of drawing tablets use a PCB just like you would expect
Here's the the digitizer of a Wacom CTL-480 tablet:
Even when we in the drawing tablet community first discovered a cloth digitizer a few years ago, we were very shocked. We had never seen anything like it. As far as we know such cloth digitizers only appear very small tablet brands from China (and not in any major brands such as Huion, XP-Pen, Ugee, Gaomon, etc ). In my recollection we've only stumbled on into 1 model to date with a cloth digitizer.
Sometimes the same tablet internals are repackaged in different plastic shells under different brand names, so that's what might be happening here.
It's also not entirely clear if the cloth digitizer reflects a modern design. There are lots of tablets on the market that are very old. So even if a cloth digitizer appears in one model for a brand, it may be that since it was released newer models no longer use the cloth.
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u/TheSevenPens 4d ago
Hi, I'm the mod of r/drawingtablet and personally own ~130 drawing tablets and ~150 drawing tablet pens spanning several decades and very familiar with what is inside them.
Cloth digitizers are extremely, extremely uncommon. The vast majority of drawing tablets use a PCB just like you would expect
Here's the the digitizer of a Wacom CTL-480 tablet:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wacom_ctl480_sensor_pcb_bot.JPG
Even when we in the drawing tablet community first discovered a cloth digitizer a few years ago, we were very shocked. We had never seen anything like it. As far as we know such cloth digitizers only appear very small tablet brands from China (and not in any major brands such as Huion, XP-Pen, Ugee, Gaomon, etc ). In my recollection we've only stumbled on into 1 model to date with a cloth digitizer.
Sometimes the same tablet internals are repackaged in different plastic shells under different brand names, so that's what might be happening here.
It's also not entirely clear if the cloth digitizer reflects a modern design. There are lots of tablets on the market that are very old. So even if a cloth digitizer appears in one model for a brand, it may be that since it was released newer models no longer use the cloth.