#mvp22u

A few months ago Yiynova sent me review hardware for the MVP22UHD. (Read that original, in-depth look here.) Drawing on the unit felt on par with its cheaper and smaller MSP19U, but the LCD panel's viewing angles were poor and the image quality was sub-par.

Panda City, the US distributor for Yiynova products, reached out to me for advice. They wanted to do right by their growing userbase. They decided to take the MVP22UHD back to the drawing board.

Fast forward. I've received the second revision of the MVP22UHD for preview. What's changed?

The MVP22UHD's LCD has been upgraded to an IPS panel. Viewing angles and color accuracy are vastly improved.

The display adapter is still, oddly, a VGA plug, but a VGA to mini-displayport adapter is now included in the box.

The digitizer's chipset has been upgraded to the latest tech UC-Logic has to offer. Some users of UC-Logic tablets and tablet monitors experienced line jitter when drawing at slow speeds. This update addresses that problem. Slow strokes felt much more natural. Diagonal strokes, also affected with jitter on some tablet models, are also improved. Drawing feels fast and accurate. The MVP22UHD feels very natural to draw on as a result.

The stylus previously required a little too much effort to actuate to full pressure. After reading my review, Yiynova took a look at their tech, saw the flaw, and corrected it. The pressure curve (the amount of pressure required to go from resting pressure to full pressure variance when pressing down on the stylus tip) is best in class.

Fonts rendered poorly with little to no hinting. I looked into what could cause such an issue in OS X. Some monitors improperly report themselves as CRTs and font smoothing is turned off by default. By using the following terminal command, I was able to force font smoothing and things seemed better.

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

You'll know the terminal command worked if your LCD smoothing option changes from a checkmark to a dash in System Preferences.

Taking a screen capture doesn't, and can't, show you this effect. Only taking a photo with a camera can. Unfortunately, it's very hard to get a clean photo that gives a sense of the scope of the problem. The images included are my best attempts.

Note the inconsistency in the font-rendering of the i's and l's in Willing.

This is sort of a hard problem to combat as I suspect the relatively low pixel density of the display has a lot to do with it. I’ve been taking macro shots of various monitors and the way they handle font smoothing in OS X for weeks and I’m just not coming up with a satisfactory answer for specifically why text looks subpar on the MVP22UHD.

It's a shame that, with all the great improvements to drawing and screen quality, this single flaw keeps me from giving the tablet monitor a glowing recommendation. If it weren't for the font rendering problems, the LCD panel quality and drawing feel were about on par with Wacom's Cintiq 22HD at half the cost.

Which budget Cintiq alternative should you get? As it stands, I recommend the MVP22UHD over the MSP19U if you don't mind slightly wonky font rendering in trade for a large display and an improved feel to drawing. If you're not one to make slow, labored strokes and can deal with worse color accuracy and viewing angles, the MSP19U is cheaper and a totally viable option.

I have both the MVP22UHD v2 and MSP19U in my studio and, despite the odd way fonts seem to be smoothed, I’ve been gravitating to the MVP22UHD. The larger screen, better color accuracy, and vastly improved viewing angles are nice additions.

It's times like these that I wish Wacom would correct the terrible light-pressure blowout in their pressure curve. I would gladly pay top dollar for their hardware if making light strokes didn't feel so god-awful. The lightest of taps register at nearly half pressure on all their tablets and tablet monitors.

My conclusion?

Yiynova is attempting to match the drawing feel and image quality, if not the industrial design, of Wacom's tech. Yiynova isn't there yet, but, with each hardware iteration, they're getting closer.

At least there's competition in the market place that listens to the art community and adjusts accordingly. I'm hopeful for the future, but stuck in the present.

MVP22UHD V2 available on Amazon.

If you want to support my digital art hardware reviews, buying anything on Amazon after visiting this referral link is greatly appreciated!

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