I just recently decided to get a tablet, so I went down to Best Buy and bought a Bamboo. The other ones were more expensive, but they just had shortcut buttons or were slightly bigger, so I didn't see the point. Although they might have also been Bamboo. Now I'm pretty confused about what the differences between tablet brands are supposed to be. I got mine because I needed to be able to draw lines on my computer with more control than I had just using a mouse. So I have a tablet, and a pen that works like a mouse on the computer when it hovers over the tablet or touches it. Could someone explain how a tablet could be any different (better?) than that, other than being bigger or having extra buttons that you don't necessarily need if you're just worried about line quality?
A bamboo, if I recall correctly, does more or less what the other tablets do. I think they're just smaller and lower resolution. Again, don't remember much about bamboos, just from looking over my friend's shoulder, I think they don't have angle sensitivity, and they are definitely lower resolution. They do have a lot of little fun functions for interacting with menus and stuff, though.
Basically, most of the graphires have kinda cheapy plastic-feeling surfaces and pens, but are pretty good quality in reception. They also come wireless.
The Intuos is basically the flagship of the non-screen tablets. It's the most expensive, but the medium and large versions have programmable LED displays, and they all have great reception, resolution, and they're textured to feel like pen on paper - they even come with nubs for the pen that can make it feel like marker or pencil or what have you. Of course, they're also the most expensive of their kind on the market, as far I know.
The Cintiqs are the insanely expensive screen/tablets. They highly intuitive, but honestly they're not my favorite kind of tablet - in order to get the reception area in front of the screen they had to make it a little less receptive. It's also in front of the screen, and not on it - that is to say, there's a slight disparity between where you're touching and where it shows up if you look at it from an angle.
I've tried a couple non-wacom tablets out there, but all of them either sucked or required batteries in the pen or something silly like that. Nonetheless, you can do the same level of art with *any* tablet.
Edit: Jeeze that's a good basis for an article right there XD