Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsGreat screen. Good enough for drawing. Slow hard drive.
Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2017
Very powerful, one-of-a kind computer. The drawing experience is great due to such a large, crisp screen, and a reasonably accurate pen. Unfortunately, the built-in hard drive is really slow, but it can easily be fixed by installing an SSD.
Pen Accuracy:
The surface studio 1 has a pen jitter problem. If you are trying to draw a picture, your lines will be wobbly, even if you use a ruler. This jitter is visible when drawing at normal speed. You WILL have to enable software smoothing in order to get rid of the jitter (clip studio has the best software smoother). The downside is that it introduces some pen lag, making it harder to do detailed line work.
These days, I prefer to do all line work on my IPad Pro -- the apple pencil has zero lag and zero jitter. However, surface studio is far preferred for digital painting, given the large screen and fairly accurate pen. Unless you are doing line work, you will not notice the pen jitter.
Slow Hard Drive:
One hour after I booted up the computer for the first time, the entire system locked up and froze. Disk usage was stuck at 100% for several more hours, and I had to reboot the computer to unfreeze everything.
The following day, I replaced the 2TB fusion drive with the SSD from my old laptop. Now, everything is very fast.
Installing an SSD and re-installing windows takes about 3 hours. The online instructions are very good. Google search "cesardelatorre surface studio ssd".
