iPad (8th Gen) Review By Brad Colbow

The latest entry-level iPad has upgraded its processor, and it looks like a perfect deal, but is it good enough to be your main art tool today? We're going to find out hello. My name is brad. I review tech for creative professionals. Today we are taking a look at the brand new 2020 eighth generation iPad. Like last year's. This one can use the Apple Pencil to be more specific.

It can use the original first generation Apple Pencil. This is the lowest end or cheapest iPad that you can often get with other tech. You don't really want to go with the low end like on Windows. That computer is just not going to cut it, but surprisingly, this runs all your drawing apps really, really well with very little compromise, and frankly, it's hard to find anything that gives you this amount of value. At this price point now, I'm going to be covering this from the point of view of an illustrator, because that's what I do if you want to pick up some illustration or art skills yourself or just learn a new app.

I have some of the highest rated procreate and affinity designer courses for the iPad available on Udemy. There are discount codes down below so make sure you check those out. It's a great way to support this channel and what I do and with that I think we've covered the basics. Let's take a look at what makes this work so well on the hardware side of things. This is the same older iPad design.

We have had for years a face button, 10.2-inch screen with the respectable resolution of 2160 pixels by 1 620 pixels. We also still have connectors along the side, so it can be used with the smart keyboard covers, which makes a ton of sense. Historically, this has been promoted by apple as its school-friendly iPad. The big new addition to this iPad is the a12 chip, not the latest and greatest processor. That apple makes, but it is a very capable processor and a nice year-over-year upgrade considering.

Last year's iPad was still only rocking the a10 chip. That's a nice bump, spec wise. It puts it on par with the current iPad Mini one thing that does separate this iPad. From the older mini is that the mini has a laminated screen. What that does be it reduces the amount of space between the glass and the screen below it? So you don't have a little gap of air.

It doesn't have a big impact on drawing here. There usually isn't a cursor on an iPad screen like you have on a PC, so you're not going to notice that offset as much as you would on a traditional drawing tablet. One thing that some folks have pointed out that they don't like about this, though, is it- does make the iPad louder when you're drawing on it there's a noticeable clacking noise whenever that pencil hits the screen. One thing a lot of folks in the tech world have been talking about a lot. Lately is the refresh rate of screens.

The iPad pros were among the first out there to get the higher res 120 hertz refresh rate. Now this screen is still running at 60 hertz. Also, the Apple Pencil doesn't have that crazy, fast latency. You find on the iPad pros either. So with all of that, you would expect the pencil to have a lot of lags, but shockingly it doesn't.

Of course, this is going to vary from app to app, but I've slowed down the drawing here in procreate, and you can see there is virtually no lag at regular speed. That lag is not really noticeable at all unless you're really looking for it. This is all to say that often software optimization tends to really close that gap of pen performance more than hardware does good. Hardware can definitely help, but what I'm saying here is good hardware paired with good software is what really makes the difference? The other drawback I look at on this device is ram, there are three gigabytes here on a PC or another device that doesn't sound like a lot. In fact, it's its not a lot of different art apps handle large files differently, for example, adobe fresco just crashes when the file size gets too big, and you run out of ram some other apps are going to slow down and not perform as well.

Procreate puts a limit on how many layers you can have in the program at any given time so that it will always feel responsive and snappy that layer limit that they put in place is based on how much ram your device has. So an iPad Pro with more ram will give you more layers than this device with less ram. This is a pretty good yardstick for how these devices perform for illustration. So if we take a standard size like 2732 pixels by 2048 pixels, that's the size of the largest iPad Pro screen on this 8th gen iPad. I'm going to get 31 layers to work with on the latest greatest 2020 iPad Pro.

I would get 115 layers as your canvas gets bigger. You will have fewer layers available for you to work with. This is good to know before you actually pick up an iPad, for example, for most people who are drawing and sketching if most of your work is going online or if you're, just learning. This iPad is going to work great you're, going to have everything that you need. However, if you're working on large print projects like a book or a full page magazine illustration or big posters, this iPad might not cut it.

If you need a lot more layers, and in that case the iPad Pro makes a lot more sense. The Apple Pencil is great, even though it uses the original Apple Pencil, not the fancy new one. The drawing experience is pretty much identical, meaning that if there is a difference I am unable to perceive it palm rejection is world-class pressure. Sensitivity is world-class tilt control is world-class recharging is not world-class. That is the one big difference between the newer Apple Pencil that works on newer iPads and this first generation Apple Pencil.

It does come with a little adapter doodad that plugs into the lightning cord, so you can charge it in a cord instead of like plugging it into the bottom of the iPad. That tends to be less awkward. If you want to charge it up without your iPad feeling off kilter like you, might accidentally break your pencil off, and I will say on personal note, this is one area that really changed. My workflow, when I got the new Apple Pencil, because with this one with the original one, I would always forget to plug it in when I was done, because I'd have to place it somewhere, special, where it wouldn't get bumped by anything or possibly break, whereas the new one, it's always sitting on the side of my iPad. It's always charged up, and it almost never goes below 50 good news here is: it does charge up fast.

A few minutes plugged in can give you up to an hour of use and a fully charged Apple Pencil is going to give you several hours of use. The one thing worth noting here is the iPad screen is slick glass. The Apple Pencil has a plastic tip. Personally, I don't like drawing on smooth glass screens, because I don't get nearly as much drawing control as I like, but that can be fixed with just a simple matte screen protector: okay, the specs and all the important stuff out of the way I'm going to get to the part of the review, which will probably get me into a little of trouble. I said at the beginning- and I said this last year, and it still holds true today, dollar for dollar.

This is the best value of any drawing tech out there. Right now, I'm surprised to say this about an Apple device since they're usually overpriced in most categories. This iPad, in conjunction with the Apple Pencil out the door you're talking about 429. This iPad really only has one glaring flaw and that's the storage. The entry-level iPad comes with 32 gigs.

You can upgrade all the way up to 128, which is a good amount of storage. However, that's another 100: can you get by with 32 gigs of storage? You absolutely can. However, you are going to be backing up your drawings a lot more often to buy more space on your iPad. If you want to get games or larger apps on your iPad, you get to run out of room faster, but really that is the only red flag I see on this iPad. The only thing I would put in the same category in terms of value might be the Samsung Galaxy tab, s6 lite, it's less expensive, and it packs in the pen, which also keeps the price down and has a terrific drawing experience as well.

The one thing that holds that back is the app ecosystem isn't nearly as robust, but nowadays, it's gotten a lot better, and it does get the job done. So I have a much easier time recommending that to folks, if you'd rather go the android route rather than apple, a lot of the other drawing tech out there just has other costs associated with it like, for example, there are pen displays that are very good that are under this price, but they aren't portable. You need to plug them into computers and the wall, and they're only going to perform as well as the computer that you have them plugged into, and their screens tend to have a lower resolution windows tablets at this price point. No, just no there's some really great windows hardware out there right now, but you have to pay a lot more for that anything that even comes close to this price point, or I'd say even under like a thousand dollars, is going to have performance issues. So sorry surface go what it comes down to is.

If you need desktop apps, this iPad still probably isn't going to be a great fit. If you expect this to replace your laptop um, you know that's getting better. That experience has improved, but for most folks I'm not sure if it's there yet. But if you want a super portable drawing tablet, that's just a blast to use really performant. Here you go alright.

So this is the question I know I'm going to get in the comments, so I'm going to address it here. Should I get this or the iPad Pro or the mini or the brand-new air which one's the best? Of course, the answer to that is, it depends so here's the breakdown if you're going to be working on larger pieces, big pieces of art, and you're going to need those extra layers that extra performance, then you're, gonna want to go with the iPad Pro. I'm not sure the new iPad Air is going to cut it here. I don't know how much ram that device has, yet we'll probably find out sometime in the next couple of days as it's released. Furthermore, I did test the iPad Mini, which is almost identical to this in terms of how much ram it has in terms of the processor that's sitting inside this thing, so spec wise its neck and neck, and it performs just as well.

That's a really, I would say cute device. If you want something tiny, that's super portable iPad Mini is definitely an option, but with that said, I wouldn't be surprised if the iPad Mini is one of the next things they update to the newer form factor, but I wouldn't expect that until next spring, the big difference between this iPad and the mini, of course, is that bonded screen you're gonna, get that bonded screen on the pros. You're going to get that bonnet screen on the new iPad Air. Should you be worried about the lack of a bonded screen on this iPad um, it's not as big of a deal as it seems on a computer like a Wacom, into type of thing, where the cursor tends to get displaced more from where your pen tip is its a bigger deal? That's not something I've really run into on iPads and other android tablets as much it's nice to have, but it's not going to like to improve your artwork or make you a better illustrator. Another thing that a lot of people talk about when they talk about iPads in the iPad.

Pro specifically, is that refresh rate on the screen and also the response time of that pencil, those from a number standpoint, definitely look better on the iPad Pro and, if you're looking for that better refresh rate like looking at these things side by side, you can tell the difference. But again I kind of feel like that's an overrated stat as well. Just like the laminated screen, it's not going to make your artwork better. It's not going to hold you back from creating great artwork. It's not going to really hurt the experience.

Furthermore, it sure is nice to have it's pretty cool, to have the latest greatest tech with all the highest refresh rates and things like that. But I don't I don't see it as a real problem, although if you are the kind of person who's annoyed by little noises like the little noise of your pencil going click-clack on the screen, maybe that it's worth looking at one of the higher-end iPads with a laminated display, so that is the 8th, gen iPad, an incredible value for the price. What do you think? Let me know down below in the comments. Thank you all for watching, and I'll talk to you in a couple of days you.

Source : Brad Colbow