I am so amped up right now!! I got a Cintiq 12WX for my birthday. OMFG best birthday gift EVAR! I haven't had a chance to work with it all that much. I did the Black Molly piece I posted today all on it. Holy crap it's like working with buttered lightning. I will say the tool won't improve your existing skills nor is it cost effective unless you're going to be using it a LOT. But if you do have the means I highly recommend getting your mitts on one if you tend to work digitally like I do.

I work with Painter primarily for my sketching and line work. I've had difficulty working with my Intuos and inking. It's hard to get crisp, smooth lines without resorting to stroking paths (which kills some of the life in line work imho). The Cintiq allows you to work with your natural range of motion even allowing you to turn the tablet just like you would your trusty sketchbook. It makes inking a dream in my book. Plus you can ctrl+Z which you can't do with a non digital brush or pen. It feels more natural as a whole and once you get used to it I'd imagine you wouldn't want it any other way. The "wide" size (I believe it's 1290x800) is handy without being unwieldy. I can imagine this would fit on nearly any size work space.

The only downsides I can see are the price (Over 1k USD) at the time I'm writing this and the amount of cords involved. I will say the cords are very well thought out as to where they go. There's still only one cord leading from your tablet to the converter box so it's not all that different than your existing tablet. Everything else plugs into an external converter. There's on VGA or DVI cable, one USB cable and the power supply so all in all not that much but still quite a lot for a small device. Setup is also not for the timid or technologically inept. READ AND FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS and you should be fine. My day job is IT and I almost got tripped up at a couple of points. In short you have to set up your tablet as a second display first THEN install the tablet driver. I also had a problem with one of my XP machines where overwriting the existing tablet drivers made it impossible to to calibrate the Cintiq. If this happens to you just uninstall the existing driver and overwrite it with the web version and things should be fine. The final step is calibrating the display with how you work. I work flat like the cintiq is a sketchbook but I know lots of peeps who use it vertically and don't move it at all. Just hop on over to your control panel and open the Wacom Tablet Manager. Hit calibrate and click with the stylus in a couple of spots and you're good to go. All in all set up is a bit involved but well worth it in the end and you should only have to do it once on each machine you want to use it on.

So that's about it. The Cintiq has let me work faster so hopefully I can get my gallery expanded faster. Thanks for listening to my rapid fire babble but I have a Cintiq now so I guess I'm entitled to a little excitement....:-D