The Huion Inspiroy H430P is Huion’s newest tablet with a battery-free pen (no-battery/no-recharge). I was pretty impressed with their Huion H640P, so I decided this tablet would be interesting to look at as well.
For this tablet, I wondered if it would be just as capable for art as the Huion H640P or Wacom Intuos (CTL-490) despite having an even smaller drawing area and being advertised as an Osu! gaming tablet.
I do not mind the fact that the Huion H430P looks like a Wacom Intuos (CTL-490), although I personally do not see the point of Huion making the impression that they’re a “rip-off” company by copying Wacom’s design.
One random note: In my opinion, this tablet should be named Huion H530P instead of H430P because the active area size is 4.8 x 3.0 inches, which is closer to 5 x 3 than 4 x 3. I’m not sure why Huion decided to call it the H430P even though that makes it sound smaller than it actually 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.
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
How good is this tablet?
Design and build quality: Excellent!
Tablet drivers: Very good!
Drawing experience: Fairly decent!
Overall: A surprisingly decent buy for 40 USD!
My verdict:
-Despite my comments above, this tablet should only be considered by people who mainly play Osu! but also want to draw on the side sometimes.
Whether you are a beginner or an experienced artist, I do not recommend this tablet because the drawing area size is very small. It is a very good tablet aside from the small size, but you can get much better art-oriented tablets for just 10 USD more (~50 USD).
As you may or may not know, my stance about drawing area sizes for beginners is that you should get at least an 8×5 or 10×6 inch tablet to make your first steps into digital art the most enjoyable.
Important specifications
Price: 41.98 USD (when this review was written) Amazon.com
Active Area: 4.8 x 3.0 inches
Pen Type: Battery-free
Pen Buttons: 2 side buttons, no eraser
Pen Pressure: 4096
Pen Tilt Sensitivity: None
Expresskeys: 4 buttons
Multi-touch: No
What’s in the box?
The Huion Inspiroy H430P comes in a simple white box with a picture of a cartoon alligator on the front.
The things that come in the box:
- Tablet
- Pen
- Tablet cable (USB type-A to Micro-USB)
- Pen nib replacements x8
- Driver installation CD shaped instruction card
- User manual
- “Thank you” card
I would be honestly surprised if you told me you don’t have internet, but if you don’t have internet, you won’t be able to get the drivers for this tablet.
This download card is shaped like a CD so people who use installation CDs will notice it and get the up-to-date drivers from the website instead.
The tablet has a fairly simple design of black and grey. The dotted area denotes the drawing area although I noticed that the active area ends around halfway between the last 2 top rows of dots rather than directly on the last row of dots.
You may have realized that this design is a fairly close copy of the Wacom Intuos, but the Huion H430P is smaller.
The surface of the tablet has a fairly smooth texture, but the pen nib causes enough friction for it to not feel too slippery to draw on.
The underside of the tablet has four rubber feet and the information sticker. The rubber feet do their job of keeping the tablet in place.
The edges aren’t rounded like the other tablets I’ve reviewed, but I didn’t have any problems with the shape of this tablet digging into my wrists or anything.
The 4 expresskeys on the top of the tablet give very good feedback when pressed and feel extremely good to use. The other 2 are on the opposite side of the tablet making only 2 of them reachable whether you’re right-handed or left-handed.
The expresskeys are great and feel better than the expresskeys on the Wacom Intuos Draw, but they are just as useless because you only have access to two. You will most likely be using your keyboard for shortcuts instead of the expresskeys, just like with the Wacom Intuos Draw.
The micro-USB port is located along the top of the tablet, making this tablet useable for both right-handed and left-handed people.
The pen is made of matte plastic with lines cut out to allow for some grip. There seems to be an extremely slight bulge near the end to hold your fingers, but it is extremely slight.
The center of gravity is towards the pen tip and the pen itself is fairly light, but the pen does not feel unbalanced when holding or using it.
This pen is a battery-free pen, meaning it does not require a battery or recharging.
Holding the pen is decently comfortable and doesn’t feel unbalanced in any way. The pen feels sturdy and doesn’t scare me into thinking it’ll break from accidentally mishandling it.
The pen buttons protrude slightly from the pen surface so they are not hard to find. They click nicely and feel good to use.
The top of the pen does not have anything.
A fun fact about the H430P is that you can use the rubber grip pen from the H640P with it!
Tablet drivers
The tablet drivers 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 huion.com or huiontablet.com and remove all other tablet drivers you have on your computer before installing it.
Once you’ve installed the driver, 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.
Although the installer doesn’t prompt you to restart your computer after it finishes, I wholeheartedly suggesting restarting your computer anyways to allow Windows to properly update the files necessary for the driver to run smoothly.
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 using the import and export buttons in the “About” section.
If you see a “Require Admin” button along the bottom of the driver, click it to give your driver proper administrator privileges so that it can make changes to system files when necessary. You may need to do so every time you restart your computer, although I haven’t had any problems while drawing without giving it administrator priveleges.
The Press Keys tab allows you to customize the functions mapped to your expresskeys. If you look in the screenshot above, the hotkeys menu has keyboard shortcuts, pen clicks, and some “switch” functions available. The drop down menu for the keyboard shortcuts is not missing any keys that I can notice.
The only thing that I notice is missing is the double click function, but it’s pretty easy to double tap your pen instead so that’s not a problem.
The Digital Pen tab allows you to change the functions mapped to the pen buttons and allows you to change the pressure curve. The pen buttons have the same configuration options as the expresskeys, so they’re very configurable.
Usually you will need to uncheck the “Enable Windows Ink” option to prevent Windows Ink from messing with your drawing. That said, some programs such as Photoshop usually do not work if it is not turned on, so play with that option as you see fit.
The Work Area tab allows you to change which monitor your tablet is mapped to, and what area of the tablet you wish to use. Make sure you use the “Screen Ratio” button so that your tablet area matches the ratio of your screen.
The drawing experience!
This tablet gave me a surprisingly good experience for a 40 USD tablet. The surface of the tablet feels good like the other more costly Huion tablets, and the passive pen works quite well. If this tablet was a bigger size, I’d be pretty happy recommending it to artists, but for now I can only really recommend it for Osu! players who occasionally want to draw on the side.
I only truly 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.
The stroke control of this tablet is fairly good, but it feels like it is a bit harder to do mid level pressure strokes compared to low or high level pressure strokes. However, when doing gradual strokes, there are no skips or dives in the pressure curve that you can see.
The slow diagonal lines I did with a ruler have some slight wobble, but it is better than most other tablets. It did not affect my drawing at all.
The thing about smaller tablets is that you have to work pretty zoomed in to be able to do accurate lines. As someone who has drawn on many differently sized tablets, I’ve gotten used to changing my zooming distance based on my tablet size, but I believe it is more beneficial for artists to work on larger tablets so that they can work zoomed further out.
I had to move my hand off the tablet to click options on the far right side of my screen, but that’s not really anything to take note of. It just means that there’s not very much space around the drawing area to put your hand if you’re not drawing in the middle of your tablet.
Conclusion
I don’t really recommend this tablet to anyone who wants to do art frequently. You will most likely be able to afford a 50 USD tablet if you can afford this 40 USD one, so I suggest that you buy a larger 50 USD tablet like the Huion H640P or XP-Pen Star 03 instead.
Like I said at the start of my review, I recommend this only to Osu! players who wish to draw on the side sometimes.
However, if you do not mind the small size, it is a very decent tablet to draw with.
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!
Digital Art Tablet Guides 
Hello, I’m looking for a drawing tablet about 40-50USD and I don’t know which one would be a good choice considering that it will be my first drawing tablet.
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Hey there,
If it’s between 40-50 USD, I would suggest either the Huion H640P (50 USD) or XP-Pen Star03 (53 USD, if you can spare 3 more dollars).
If your computer screen is less than 22-inches, then I suggest the Huion H640P. If your computer screen is 22-inches or larger, then I suggest the XP-Pen Star03.
The Huion H640P is somewhat higher quality than the XP-Pen Star03, but it’s smaller so I suggest it for smaller screens. If your screen is big, then the XP-Pen Star03 will feel much better to use on a large screen.
Hope that helps,
Nikage
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Thank you!, that helped me a lot 😀
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Hi
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Hi, i need to buy a tablet for an online course and during presentation. Do you recommend this tablet over the old wacom bamboo .
https://www.amazon.fr/Wacom-Bamboo-CTH-470S-Tablette-graphique/dp/B005RC23D8
Thanks
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Hi there,
If it’s just between those two tablets, then I would suggest the Wacom Bamboo which you linked. The Huion H430P is smaller than the Wacom Bamboo, which means that it is harder to use accurately, and I honestly would not recommend anything smaller than Wacom’s small size, which is the size of the Wacom Bamboo that you linked.
I hope that answers your question,
Nikage
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I decided to buy this after i read your review, it works surprisingly well. Thank you!
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Hi, I am interested on this table to use it for taking notes at school. Would you recommend this tablet for this end?
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Hi there,
I personally would recommend looking at tablets with screens for note taking (ex. iPad+Stylus, Android tablet+Stylus, Microsoft Surface Go, etc), or sticking to pen and paper if those are not an option.
I’ve never tested using these types of tablets for notetaking, but I think a more standard tablet with screen would be better for that kind of usage. Standard tablets with screens will be more portable, easier to set up and use (don’t need to pull out laptop and find a place to put the tablet), and those devices are more optimized for tasks like notetaking.
That’s my take on it, but if you believe you can make it work, then you can try taking notes with a screen-less tablet. I just cannot guarantee anything about how worthwhile it will be to use it for notetaking.
-Nikage
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Is this tablet ok to give as christmas gift to a person who does traditional art? They only do some phone doodles now and then but I’m not sure if they will do serious digital art.
This tablet is better than Xp pen g430 right?
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Hi there,
In my eyes, since the Huion H430P and XP-Pen G430 both fall under the category of “Extremely small” size tablets of 4.8 x 3 inches or smaller, I do not believe either is “better” than the other in any significant way.
Personally, for any aspiring artist, I would suggest against these “Extremely small” size tablets, and get at least a “Small” size tablet of 6 x 3.7 inches or larger if possible.
In this case, rather than go with the “Extremely small” size Huion H430P and XP-Pen G430, I would instead recommend the “Small” size XP-Pen G640 or XP-Pen G640S, which is a step up in size for basically no difference in price.
The reason why I recommend a bigger size when possible is because a bigger size means better control over the cursor, making it easier for the user to adapt to “blind drawing” (which is where you draw while looking at the screen and not at your hand), especially when they are a beginner to screen-less tablets.
It is possible that your recipient may be fine with the “Extremely small” size, but the vast majority of people find it too small and restrictive, so I recommend getting at least the “Small” size if possible.
-Nikage
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Hello! I know this might be a little late for commenting but is this tablet compatible with Medibang? Also if you have any idea if this is compatible with the Samsung J7 phone.
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Hey there,
Yes, I believe it is compatible with Medibang. With regards to phone compatibility, I was told by Huion that they were able to make their tablets work with Samsung phones as well, but I never confirmed it myself.
Personally, I would recommend asking Huion directly about all your compatibility questions as I am not completely sure about their phone compatibility.
-Nikage
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