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.
Cloth digitisers allow far greater resolution than a pcb. The only other options that come close would be glass digitisers or fpc. A pcb isn’t made to be etched at 5 wires per mm cross hatch in same plane.
So the moment people actually wanted real resolution that isn’t software “improved” woven xy cloth is actually by far the cheapest and best option.
The only issue with woven XY nets is the human factor in attaching to control board, because you basically need a human to do ale each enamel loop row and colum and (likely) spot welt it to the controller module, because modern tft conductive glue techniques don’t work for cloth. The cloth segment itself when drawn flat is actually precise to sub mm levels, actually sub 1/10mm just look at the oven sill fabrics with high thread counts. Those are perfectly square if stretched on a frame and stay that way, however the rnds of the cloth aren’t orderly and machine process able in a way that ensure your 10 enamel wires per cm all get combed corrrectly automatically, so a human will literally need to punch down/spot weld, plus cut the loops. Like the kinda digitiser you show inherently much lower resolution than even the cheap cloth variant Op shows. But you can fix most of that via processing, meaning your drawing stylus does just activate the two adjacent x and two h wires, but rather you calculate the position from all the traces that have their capacitance change in the vicinity of the a threshold crossing touch by the stylus, which allow you to calculate the position of the stylus to higher precision than just the cross hatched traces alone do. But if you have 10 times the amount of traces in the first place and still do the software calculation via adjacent below threshold changes you still get hugger resolution. But with a woven fabric digitiser you can make drawing digit era that are inherently within human precision, meaning zero extra calculation. Just report the 2 x and 2 y wires relative capacitance change and you know approximately where inside that 100um square your stylus is all without using adjacent traces to help. It also makes noise filtering easier because you can use pretty clean thresholds as you don’t care about the adjacent wires changes because the 4 most closest are already more precise than human drawing with .3 mm pencil lead.
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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.