Wacom, Wacoff

Many moons ago I decided to pick up a tablet monitor for my PC. I didn't really fancy the idea of paying the Wacom tax for a Cintiq, so instead I got a Yiynova MVP22U.

Hardware wise it's served me reasonably well, though at one point the power board flaked out on me. I was able to get a replacement from the US distributor of the brand, though, and since then I haven't had any issues.

Well, not any hardware issues, at least. The issue was with the software, in particular the drivers for Windows 10. For whatever reason, every time I rebooted the machine, Windows 10 would disable the pen input drivers for the monitor, and I'd end up with just a regular monitor with no pen functions until I ran the Yiynova installer to remove the driver, reboot, install the driver, reboot, and then it'd work again until the next reboot.

I finally got sick of this dance, so I figured it was time to do something about it.

And wouldn't you know it, but these Wacom Cintiqs are old enough now to be going for pennies on FleaBay. This one in particular is the DTK-2200.

I picked a listing that was missing the stand and power supply but did have the pen and its holder. The pen is still somewhat expensive since people tend to break and/or lose them on a pretty regular basis. Luckily people are much less likely to misplace the power supply, and it's largely a commodity item other than the peculiar connector they decided to use, so finding a substitute was cheap and easy.

And out of the box we can see that it's a bit dirty, but there's no major scratches on the display area of the screen, and just a few minor scuffs on the bezel.

Around back it still has the mounting ring for the original stand, but I won't be needing it since I don't have that stand and I'll be mounting it to a VESA arm.

So I'll need to remove that ring and then also temporarily remove the IO cover panel so I can move the cables to the lower slot.

I have to say this is a pretty decent design. Some other models of Cintiq would, for example, have the USB cable soldered directly to the PCB, meaning that if it got damaged it was quite an involved process to replace it. But here there's just a plain 4-pin extension cable for the power, a regular DVI cable, and a USB-B cable. Very simple and serviceable.

Anyway, back together it goes, and we'll give the backside a cleaning while we're here.

There's still a few scuffs but it cleaned up pretty well. The front cleaned up nicely too.

And mounted up to the arm, it fits nicely in place of the Yiynova, though it is a touch larger thanks to the bigger bezels.

So we just need to install the drivers and...

Real classy, Wacom. I literally installed the drivers linked from the product page for this monitor, but you couldn't be bothered to keep support for this model going in that version.

Luckily the older version isn't too hard to find on their site, and installing it goes pretty smoothly.

Of course you might notice in this photo that everything around the monitor looks rather astonishingly yellow. This is because the white point on the monitor is set wrong, but rather than just switching it I'll go ahead and do a full calibration.

This takes something like an hour and a half, maybe two hours, but when it's done the colours look almost perfect.

The colour is off just ever so slightly in the darkest greys/blacks but I think that's probably due to either ambient light bleed or backlight bleed, and in either case it's not really anything to worry about. What's important is that the colour is basically spot-on, and I now have a tablet monitor that doesn't get its drivers eaten every time I reboot.