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In this article, I give you my XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro Pen monitor review with specs included. This is a 24-inch pen display or pen monitor. What does that mean? For those who are totally new to these things it means you can draw right on the display with a pen and it requires a computer to drive it. That is what I have for this review.

The PC I have plugged into this monitor is not an ‘average’ computer. I just used it because it happens to be very powerful so any performance issues wouldn’t be down to it.

So, this test PC has an Intel 11th generation Core i9 and RTX 3060 GPU, which is kind of overkill for a lot of illustration purposes but again that’s the point.

The really exciting thing about the XP-PEN monitors is how much they’ve improved. You hope that companies make better and better products over time but do not expect such leaps forward.

What I mean is, that I’ve been reviewing these for several years from XP-PEN and from Huion which are two of the major more affordable alternatives to Wacom Cintiq products. And, it used to be the XP-PEN was never really that competitive with Cintiq or Cintiq Pro products in terms of the silkiness of line quality, ease of use for the driver, and display quality wasn’t as good, and all that sort of thing. And, that’s starting to change with XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro Pen monitor.

So what got better about this monitor? First off it has a 2K resolution of 2560 by 1440 instead of the usual 1080p. To be honest with the 22 to 24-inch monitors with 1080p resolution you could see the pixels and that can impact your experience. And when you’re doing artwork and you’re drawing at 1080p you might think it looks okay and then you put on a higher resolution display or print it out then you see that didn’t look as good as you thought.

So more resolution is better. Obviously, this is not there with the Wacom Cintiq Pro 24-inch which has 4K resolution but that one costs about two and a half times as much money.

The price for this one is $899.99 (MSRP). That initial price puts the XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro Pen monitor in the range far from a Cintiq Pro.

You also have USB-C on board for a single cable connection which is pretty nice. Just in case your computer doesn’t have USB-C it also comes with an HDMI cable and USB-C to USB-A adapter.

So you can go old school for the connection. But that’s a nice thing. And comparing that to a Wacom Cintiq 22 which is their more budget-oriented 22-inch pen display. That one doesn’t have USB-c. And that one’s only 1080p and that costs around $1200 (MSRP). So that’s why I’m saying XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro Pen monitor looks pretty good for the money.

But, ultimately, it all comes to how good is the display quality and the pen performance. Happily, the pen quality is good and the display quality is good.

In terms of the metrics of the display just gauging this as a monitor in terms of color and brightness and all that sort of thing. It does pretty well. You’ve got 90% of P3 coverage on here.

Also, XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro Pen monitor has a little over 300 units of brightness. And typically pen monitors are not that bright. So that’s pretty nice. One caveat here is that this does not have a laminated display or bonded display as it’s usually described.

Laminated display tends to be an expensive thing to do and of course, we’ll get that on the Cintiq pro, not on the so-called ‘budget Cintiq’. And that means there’s a little bit of parallax with the pen. It’s noticeable. You’ll see that pen tip offset that’s not miscalibration of the pen but just that there is a glass above the touch layer that creates a spacing.

And this is a matte display which is great and it has a tooth to it. So it’s good that your pen doesn’t skate everywhere. But it’s not permanent edge glass. That’s a more pricey kind of thing to do. It is a well-applied kind of surface overlay on this.

Now i can’t see the edges and peel it off like it used to be with some of the older ones but that is still what it is. It comes with a battery-free pen. The usual 8192 pressure levels and the usual cigar case kind of holder or tampon holder depending on how you want to look at that.

And which is nice and then it doubles as a stand the bottom half of it and it holds eight extra nibs. So the eight nibs are identical. They’re there and for when you wear one out. Though these typically are pretty long-lasting. Um so that’s going to be another difference from the Wacom Cintiq or the Cintiq pro. Both of those which can use a variety of pens.

There’s the Wacom 3d pen there’s the slim pen there’s the legacy you can still use them airbrush pens and they have different nibs available. Like I’m really fond of Wacom’s felt in them. So no felt nibs here. The good news is that this nib feels good on the screen and there’s no squeakiness.

Sometimes we’ve seen this with some of these more affordable pen displays where every time you draw it goes it’s not happening here. So pen looks pretty much like their older generations. It has a soft touch finish on it. Has two side buttons. It does not have an eraser on the end.

And you can program the side buttons. And they are too easy to press accidentally. So I usually assign undo to one of them and I’ve decided not a good idea because I was accidentally undoing stuff all the time that i was doing. Other than that it works fine. And you can choose any command that you want.

Like I assign one of the keys to be the alt key for sampling in photoshop when drawing. You can do all that. Now once in a while, I noticed I would make a change to a button assignment here and it wouldn’t actually happen in a particular application.

This is system-wide it’s not application specific like it is with Wacom. Which is kind of weird. The drivers are pretty mature and this has been out more than six months now but you know it is what it is. Speaking of drivers. Drivers are available for windows for mac os including big star and Linux even.

I did most of my testing on windows this time mostly because big sur is still kind of a headache with pen displays and pen display drivers and permissions around that all that sort of thing. So you also have well what Wacom calls express keys and then call too on the sides here.

And these are programmable left and right so it doesn’t matter if you’re left-handed or you’re right-handed. And they’re pretty convenient. And you’ve got the two jog wheels here which are really well tuned. Often jog wheels are lurchy it makes too big a change too small to change.

I sign one of them to changing my brush size I do the other one for zoom alternatively you can set one of them to rotate the canvas. Because this is not a touch screen. Those work great. The buttons on the side are kind of too easy to press much like the pen.

So that means particularly as me being a left-handed person my hand is leaning against this bezel here and I’m using the tools that are typically mounted along the left program like photoshop and I was touching them by accident all the time.

So I kind of prefer the walk and way with the express key remote that you hold in your hand to avoid that problem but that’s my personal preference. You know what you like. Additional connectivity on this includes two USB-A ports. Basically has a USB hub built-in.

So you can use that to connect a mouse or a keyboard or charge your phone which is kind of nice. You don’t see that all the time especially on the budget models. The stand on this is heavy duty and it’s adjustable and it’s removable too. So you can put on a vesa or visa mount however you want to pronounce that.

If you want to put it on an ergotronic arm or whatever that sort of thing. So sturdy and very adjustable a lot of lots of increments and is pretty easy to use. That’s nice because often you don’t get stands with some of the more expensive brands too.

Also, you can set it to be almost upright which gets to be careful a little bit tipsy there but for some people this would be their main monitor if they’re attaching it to a laptop or something like that. So you might want it more upright at times when you’re just using it as a monitor instead of a pen display.

But let’s talk about the line quality and the drawing experience. That’s what really is the most important thing here, isn’t it? And that has improved leaps and bounds. It’s almost up there with Wacom Cintiq at this point. And that’s a great achievement because Wacom Cintiq and the apple pencil are still the best out there.

Pressure levels on this are pretty good. You can adjust the pressure curves on it to suit you. I have a very light touch for example and it works for me. You’ve got tilt 60 degrees of tilt which works pretty well-accepting credit.

Now I tested this with photoshop with Corel painter 2022 with clip studio paint and it worked great in all those but with credit tilt not so much. I couldn’t get that working. So critter’s your thing keep that in mind. But other than that those features actually work on it quite well.

There’s no pin rotation support. So sometimes I think if you’re trying to rotate the pen to do tilt and you’re also curving around so you’re trying to do something like a fan it might not work. It has a little skipping or blank spots.

The other caveat I noticed is some time with sketching every once in a while it just would ignore a stroke. Just would in a variety of programs. I don’t know why that is but it doesn’t happen that often. Maybe once in every 50 strokes something like that. In terms of the line quality it’s pretty silky it’s pretty smooth.

There’s a little bit of jitter. I mean the slow diagonal line test everything is going to show a little bit of jitter. It certainly is much better than a lot of tablet PC kind of screens that are on the market these days. But my lines were not as perfectly curved and smooth you know.

If you go really slow you’ll see the problem the most if you go faster it’ll be better. But even moderate drawing speed a little bit of waviness sometimes. Not a deal breaker and I’m being kind of picky here. And again if you’re comparing this to something Wacom AES or entering digitizers on Surface.

This thing is dreamy in comparison. Another thing to mention is this is silent. As far as I know, it doesn’t have a fan inside. So for those who’ve been using noisy Cintiq pros well, that’ll be a plus. So in the end, if you’re looking to move up to something more serious.

You want the big display experience you like to draw or paint large maybe you’re used to canvases or something like that this one is certainly worth a look. If you got a good chunk of money to spend maybe it’s 900 but you don’t want to go crazy with the Wacom Cintiq pro level of pricing here.

You’re still getting a fairly high-resolution display there. There’s no shame in a 2k resolution display at 24 inches. The color accuracy of the display it’s not fantastic but it is easily fixed. And if you use something like a colorimeter or one of these things they cost about 120 dollars you can set that up with no problem or you can try to eyeball and match it.

But it’s not so different from a pretty decent display on this MSI despite what it says intel here high-end display going on. So, the display quality is good. The pen quality on this really good almost catching with Wacom at this point.

And fix some of that a little bit of jittery line just on occasion the occasional missing strokes that sort of thing and we’re there. I’m pretty darn impressed with this. And to be honest, I’ve reviewed a lot of the XP-Pens and the Huions before and I also have that Cintiq pro sitting around and that’s the one that I always ran back to.

With this one, I was like no I think I’m going to finish my artwork on this one it’s working just great. So that’s pretty good given the fact that it’s a lot more affordable than the tier A alternatives.