Huion Inspiroy Q11K Review

Warning:
This review is now well over 1 year old and may contain outdated information.
I suggest looking for a newer review if possible.

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Huion Inspiroy Q11K

I was provided this tablet for testing by Huion. I was told that reviewing was optional, but I had been moving towards reviewing the tons of tablets I have and this turned out to be a good chance for me to start, so here it is!

Please note!
-I am not a Mac or Linux user!! I only tested this tablet on Windows 8 and Windows 10.
-Prices may have changed since I wrote this review.
-Check when a review was written. Some aspects may improve or change over time, so it is in your best interest to concentrate on reviews which are less than 1 year old.

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Table of contents

• How good is this tablet?
• Important specifications
• What’s in the box?
• Tablet drivers
• The drawing experience!
• Conclusion
• Places to buy the tablet

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How good is this tablet?

Design and build quality: Excellent!
Tablet drivers: Almost perfect!
Drawing experience: Extremely comfortable!

Overall: A very good buy for 120 USD!

My verdict:
-If you are considering this as your first graphic tablet, I would recommend getting this instead of the “beginner” Wacom Intuos any day. It is well worth the extra 20-40 USD if you can afford it.
-If you are experienced with tablets, I would recommend you get this instead of a Wacom Intuos Pro if you don’t need the following features of the Intuos Pro: pen tilt/rotation, multi-touch, and touch wheel.

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Important specifications

Price: 119.99 USD (when this review was written) Amazon.com
Active Area: 11 x 6.875 inches
Pen Type: Recharging
Pen Buttons: 2 side buttons, no eraser
Pen Pressure: 8192
Pen Tilt Sensitivity: None
Expresskeys: 8 buttons
Multi-touch: No
Special features: USB wireless connection

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What’s in the box?

The Huion Inspiroy Q11K comes in a nice and simple, easy to open box.

 

The things that come in the box:

• Tablet
• Pen
• Pen stand
• Tablet cable (USB type-A to Micro-USB)
• Pen charging cable
• Wireless receiver (USB type-A)
• Pen nib replacements x8
• Driver installation CD
• User Manual
• ‘Thank you” card

The tablet has an interesting spotted design around the drawing area, but overall it looks very nice. It has a rather large overall footprint, but it should fit perfectly in any 15.6-inch laptop bag.

The surface of the tablet is a smooth design, but it has enough texture to prevent you from sliding and losing control of your pen. This is probably the best type of texture to prevent nibs from wearing out while giving you decent control over your strokes.

The underside of the tablet has the usual information sticker and four rubber feet. The rubber feet do a good job as I have not had any problems with the tablet sliding around.

The expresskeys are amazing, exactly how the Intuos Pro buttons felt. They are hard enough to press that you don’t accidentally press them by resting your fingers on them, but they are light enough that you don’t have to press too hard to use them. They’re also much quieter than the other alternative tablets which have cheap plastic buttons which click really loud.
If you’re a first-time digital artist, then you won’t know how good expresskeys are supposed to be, but trust me that these are of amazing quality.

 

The ON/OFF switch on the left side of the tablet is for turning on the wireless mode. The wireless mode is on when the little white circle between the expresskeys is on, and the tablet automatically turns off after 15 minutes of inactivity. If the tablet goes to sleep, you have to toggle the ON/OFF switch to turn it back on.

The lock switch on the right side of the tablet locks the expresskeys and prevents them from activating any functions. I guess if you don’t need the expresskeys you can just leave that switch on lock.

The pen is made of a full matte plastic with an interesting shape that actually feels very nice to hold. It has an indent near the tip to catch your fingers, then it bulges around the middle and tapers out toward the other end. The center of gravity is around the middle, but closer to the tip than the top by a slight bit.

The top of the pen has the charging hole for plugging in the pen charging cable.

 

I know some people prefer rubber grip pens, but this plastic pen does not feel worse in any way. I actually prefer this type of comfortable plastic pen over rubber grip pens because I apply skin cream to my hands and that makes a rubber grip pen slippery and hard to use.

One thing to note about the pen is that to turn on the pen, you have to apply max pressure once and the pen will stay on for around 5 minutes before automatically powering off. Unlike most other recharging pens, pressing the pen buttons or applying light pressure to the nib will not turn on the pen. This is a countermeasure against wasting pen battery life while being carried around in a backpack and it is a very smart feature for people who intend to take this tablet around with them. If you’ve used other recharging pens though, it takes a bit to get used to consciously waking up the pen.

 

Another thing to note about this pen is that the pen nib sinks quite far into the pen from min to max pressure. This is unlike the Wacom pens where the pen nib barely even moves when pressure is applied. However, I never found this a problem and I personally prefer feeling the pen nib sink, but my friends opinions were split about which one they prefer.
The pen nib quirk will not affect beginners as they have no previous experiences to compare the pen to, but people who are experienced with other tablets (namely Wacom) may dislike how far the pen nib sinks. I can use both Wacom and Huion just fine so it’s most likely something you can get used to.

I really like this pen stand!
The weight is very concentrated in the bottom piece, and combined with the light plastic top piece it’s actually very hard to topple accidentally. It’s actually quite refreshing to see Huion make a new pen stand design instead of using the same pen stand that every other alternative does.

Inside the pen stand are the plentiful replacement nibs that you’ll probably never need because the tablet surface is pretty smooth in the first place.

The pen nib remover is that small metal ring in the top half of the pen stand. You stick your pen tip in there and then pull and the pen nib is simply removed.

That slot in the pen stand is where you can store the wireless receiver.

This is the wireless receiver which lets you draw wirelessly on the Q11K. Make sure you store it in your pen stand whenever you’re not using it so you don’t lose it.

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Tablet drivers

The tablet driver are extremely easy to install. You don’t even need to have your tablet plugged in to install them! Just go download the latest version from huiontablet.com and remove all other tablet drivers you have on your computer before installing it.

 

Once you’ve installed it, the icon shows up in your taskbar, and the driver also creates a shortcut on your desktop so you don’t have to go searching for it in your apps.
Correction: The desktop icon only starts the Huion driver software (if it doesn’t run automatically on startup) and clicking it doesn’t actually open the settings screen. To open the settings screen, you will need to click the Huion icon in the system tray (the bottom right portion of your screen). 
If you don’t see the Huion icon in the system tray, it could be automatically hidden by Windows. If so, click on the small white arrow to show all the system tray icons.

 

In the driver, you can configure your tablet expresskeys, pen buttons, pen pressure curve, and work area. There’s also an option to save different profiles, although the save and open buttons are named a bit ambiguously (they’re the import config and export config buttons in the “About” section. I only found out you could save profiles when I read about the new driver features in the Huion forums). So now people who complain about alternatives not being able to save custom profiles for different programs can consider the Q11K.

As you can see above, you can basically customize the buttons to anything. The same cuztomization window shows up when customizing the pen buttons.
The only thing that I notice missing is left double click. It seems you can customize your buttons to anything aside from that.

I was actually surprised when I saw the pen curve chart because I was so used to the basic one line bar for pen sensitivity. I was even more surprised when testing the pen sensitivity that changing the pressure curve actually caused the pen pressure to change noticeably. You can increase and decrease the pen pressure curve from -4 to +4. I found my sweet spot at +1.

For the “Work Area” tab, I suggest using the “screen ratio” button so that your vertical and horizontal motions are properly matched. My screen is 1920x1080p, and when I clicked the screen ratio button, it slimmed the vertical width a fair bit. It may be a small thing, but just a tip from me to make sure you get the right experience.

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The drawing experience!

This tablet gave me one of the best drawing experiences I’ve ever had with a graphic tablet. The smoothness of the tablet made it feel very responsive, although occasionally I did feel it was a slight bit too smooth. However, it feels way better to have this smoothness than to know you’re slowly scraping off a rough surface and ruining your pen nibs and tablet!

 

Huion Inspiroy Q11K

I only test my tablets on Clip Studio Paint because that’s all I use. You should contact Huion support directly if you want to know if the tablet is compatible with the drawing program you use, but most major drawing programs should be compatible. Their customer support is also very kind so there’s no need to be afraid of contacting them directly.

Anyways, the stroke control of the pen is very good and the tapering is really smooth. The one problem I was able to find with the pen control is the slight waviness when doing slow diagonal lines. It’s not particularly bad and it could be much worse, but it’s there just so you know.

The expresskeys on this tablet are the only ones I’ve wanted to use since my old Wacom Intuos Pro. All the other alternatives I bought had really cheap plastic expresskeys which really didn’t make me feel like using them, or the drivers just didn’t have enough customization so I couldn’t do what I wanted with them anyways.
Once you feel premium keys, you have a really hard time accepting anything less.

The wireless on this tablet works without a hitch. You install the driver, plug in the wireless receiver, turn on the tablet, and it works no problem. There is no delay when using wireless compared to wired, so I decided to use the wireless the whole time to avoid having the wire snake across my desk. I couldn’t care less about wires, but hey, if there’s wireless I might as well use it, right?
Since the wireless lasts 40 hours on a single charge, I didn’t run out or power during my testing at all, but I should probably charge it soon.

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Conclusion

This is a fantastic tablet for its price of 120 USD on Amazon.com. That’s basically the same price as a Wacom Intuos small, except the Q11K has a way bigger active area for better line control, and it has 8 completely customizable expresskeys.

If a beginner digital artist has enough money to consider an Intuos, I would much rather they spend 20-40 USD extra to get this. It should be well worth it to get all that extra active area space instead of just paying for the Wacom brand name.

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Places to buy the tablet

Huion Store | Amazon.com | Amazon.ca
People living in other regions should check their regions Amazon or see if the Huion Store ships to them.

If you have any questions about the tablet, feel free to ask me!

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