REVIEW : XP-Pen Deco Pro MW

Hey folks. Lots of us like the usability of a drawing tablet for editing images. They are particularly handy for making freehand selections, spot healing and with the new point colour options in Lightroom Classic and Photoshop very precise when doing colour picks.

I have been a Wacom customer for many years and have spent more money than I should have over time on tablets in the Bamboo and Intuos lineups as well as the Cintiq pen displays, one that worked out superb and one that proved to be an enormous pain in the butt.

When I got a new MacBook Pro last year, it came with macOS Ventura and I had difficulty getting it to recognize my old Intuos Pro small, and just bnever got back to it. When a situation arose where I needed the Intuos, it took hours of work manually removing the cruft left behind by endless versions of Wacom drivers to get an Intuos Medium to work at all, and I never got the Small to connect at all. I was able to connect it to an older Mac Pro running Monterey without any issue using an older version of the driver. I recently upgraded the MacBook Pro to Sonoma, and the Wacom driver started pitching a fit throwing up dialogs saying that the Wacom driver was no longer loaded. I did not care because there was no tablet connected at the time, although the constant popups were really annoying.

So after screwing around for so long, I decided to get a new editing tablet and decided going in that I would not spend one more dime on Wacom. I ordered instead an XP-Pen Deco Pro MW, which has a rotary wheel, eight function buttons, a nice pen, and works over either USB or Bluetooth.

The device came and I connected the USB cable. The wheel light lit up in red indicating that the device was connected via USB. I picked up the pen and it was working, and immediately provided full coverage across my 47” wide cured display. I downloaded the drivers, which are in fact, just an app that runs in a Window and activates a launch agent.

No screwing around, no reboots, no hide and seek of preferences and drivers, and library changes. Literally plug and play.

I followed the instructions to power the device on using its internal battery (which is charged via a USB C connection) and activated pairing mode. Apple’s Bluetooth service found the device and paired it without requiring any blood sacrifices or voodoo dances, completely different from recent Wacom experiences.

Here’s the real kicker. Based on numbers on Amazon Canada as I write this, is selling for $459.99 The XP-Pen Deco Pro MW is selling for $149.99 and there is a coupon for an additional $30 off active now. So the XP-Pen Deco Pro costs $310 LESS not including the coupon, was recognized immediately, had no driver headaches and just works. It is true that you do not get a bunch of software that you won’t ever use with it, but the savings along will pay for a full year of the Adobe Photographer’s Bundle subscription.

Conclusion

With respect for past success, I am done with Wacom. When the products work, they are great. If you get a good person on their support desk, that individual can be awesome. But when I have more issues than my time costs just getting the devices to work as specified, their value to me is now zero. The XP-Pen Deco Pro MW does everything I need, I have yet to find any way where it is less usable than the Wacom it replaced, and the cost was basically one third that of the comparable Wacom. You make your own decisions as you should, but I am very happy with the XP-Pen Deco Pro MW.

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