Genius G-Pen F509 Pen Tablet
The Genius G-Pen F509 is your newest offering in affordable portable pen tablets that works well and comes with all the essentials for easy tablet work in your favorite graphics programs.
Ease of Use, Performance: 20/25
Look & Feel: 22/25
Features 18/25
How much I enjoy 20/25
Total: 80/100
Genius does it again with an affordable and easy to use pen tablet that works well in all the graphics and editing programs I could throw at it. I am currently working with a great string of products including Adobe and Corel software and have really tested out the G-Pen F509 for all its worth.
The Genius G-Pen Tablet is a nice but smaller, more portable sized tablet for use in your graphics programs to make drawing and artistic effects easier. The pen tablet comes with the tablet itself, a battery operated pen, pen holder, AA battery, tip replacement tweezers, extra tips, 3 button assignment sheets, driver CD and manual.
While the manual is not very useful it does have a couple of pages in English for installation and there are also some instructions on the CD. The drivers are easy to install and include the regular drivers and the MacroKey Manager that is pretty easy to use.
I had no problems with software installing and using the MacroKey Manager is quite easy with a selection of shortcut key assignments available for each buttons area of the tablet. The tablet has 14 buttons along the sides, 7 on each side, and 12 across the top that are assignable inprofiles.
The G-Pen F509 tablet is 10.5 inches wide and 8.5 inches high with a thickness of less than a quarter inch across the working area. The top inch of the tablet has a thicker area where the USB cable connects and the tablet has a plastic cover page that is connected across the top.
You can insert one of three button sheets that has a black work area and the common buttons for Windows Vista, Windows XP or MAC buttons that are preset in the MacroKey Manager. If you want to create your own sheet to go with your own profile you can just scan one of the three sheets that are included and edit it to create your own personalized button assignment sheet.
The MacroKey Manager is a simple to use program that has two preset profiles, Windows Vista and Windows XP 2000, for Windows so you have a starting place. You can simply start with one of these and edit it to create your own or create your own profile from scratch.
I created my own MacroKey Manager Profile and assigned keys then made a sheet according to my work habits with Dreamweaver and Photoshop easily. It took me a couple of hours to not only assign keys and create the sheet but make sure everything was working the way I wanted in the programs I commonly use.
I had no problem over the past few weeks using the pen tablet and found no issues with handwriting through Windows or with pen flicks. The pen tablet works exactly as it is supposed to and the assignable buttons make for an easy way to use programs and shortcut keys for creating artistic works in editing and illustration software.
The G-Pen Tablet works well in both Adobe programs like Illustrator, Photoshop and Dreamweaver and in Corel’s DRAW and PAINT programs. The tablet has no special features and is quite a plain one but is also very reasonably priced at about $70-$80 from several places on the internet including Newegg.com.
The F509 tablet is a nice portable size and fits well into a laptop bag or backpack and is a nice size to use at a desk even if the desk is cluttered. The tablet is not one of those oversized desk dedicated tablets but the more convenient sized portable device to carry along on trips or to job sites.
I really enjoy using this tablet over a larger one as it is convenient to be able to set aside without having to find space for it elsewhere on my desk. The pen works well and flows smoothly across the work surface which is nice with its plastic cover sheet.
The premade sheets or ones you create easily slide in and it is quite simple to design your own with an image editing program and a little ingenuity by simply downloading or finding icons or symbols. The plastic sheet is also nice to slide pictures under for tracing using the pen and tablet which worked out very well in Photoshop and PAINT.
I really did not have any problems using the Genius G-Pen F509 Pen Tablet and found it worked well for every application I used with it. The pen tablet is a nice size and very affordable, works well and comes with everything you need for artistic creation beyond what a mouse can do.