(May 24, 2019) Update: I have updated this review with the new Drawing Tests section which I have recently started doing in my reviews.
The conclusion of this review is unchanged. It is viable tablet choice if you do not intend to use your pen at an “extreme” angle. If you want a tablet without any wobbly lines, I suggest paying an extra 20 USD for the Huion H1060P instead.
(May 06, 2019) Update: It has been brought to my attention by one of my readers that the line wobble I mainly talk about is not particularly detrimental for the Huion H950P in the majority of use cases. As such, I will no longer be recommending against the Huion H950P.
The explanation why is below.
Above is the slow ruler line test I did before for the Huion H950P while holding the pen at different angles.
As you can see, there appears to be more wobble the more tilted you hold the pen, which is obviously not ideal. However, the “normal” pen angle is completely fine and usable, despite being slightly wobbly.
My mistake was interpreting these results as a fail when they were clearly good enough, with only a bad result for an angle that not everyone will use the pen at. It should also be noted that most people will draw quicker than I did on this test which would reduce the amount of noticeable wobble even more.
In conclusion, the Huion H950P is not a bad tablet. It is instead a completely viable tablet which just has a small imperfection which can be ignored in many use cases.
This review has been updated with new conclusions which point out this issue, but do not recommend against the Huion H950P.
You can read about the issues which this tablet used to have in this post: The issues the Huion H640P/H950P used to have
(Jan. 31, 2019) Update: There is a new firmware update for the Huion H950P which slightly improves the wobbly lines when using the pen at certain angles, however, it does not fix it completely.
Specifically, the new firmware update makes the lines perfectly straight when using the pen 90 degrees upright, but the more you tilt the pen, the more the line wobbles.
As such, my current review and conclusion regarding this tablet will remain mostly unchanged.
The Huion H950P was the second tablet released by Huion with a battery-free pen, and is the bigger version of the Huion H640P. It was actually released a whole year ago near the end of 2017, but Huion did not really market it that much so it didn’t receive very much attention.
It also took around half a year after launch for it to become available on popular online stores like Amazon, so it’s possible people were not interested in buying it due to the high shipping cost involved with buying it on Huion’s site.
The reason why I decided to buy it and review it now is because I could not get a very good grasp on how good it was based on the reviews and comments it had. Amazon reviews are extremely positive, whereas the owners of the H950P which I spoke to were experiencing the same issues which I noted on my H640P.
With this being the case, I couldn’t recommend it confidently despite it being a nice looking tablet based on its paper specs and price.
The conclusion I have arrived at is that the Huion H950P is a decent tablet, with a small issue which won’t affect the majority of users.
Anyways, onto the review.
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?
- Why I do not recommend this tablet
- Specifications at a glance
- What’s in the box?
- Tablet drivers
- Drawing tests
- The drawing experience!
- Conclusion
- Places to buy the tablet
How good is this tablet?
Design and build quality: Excellent!
Tablet drivers: Quite good!
Drawing experience: Good for the most part, but noticeable wobbly lines when holding pen at an “extreme” angle.
Design choices: Very good!
-Nitpicks: Direction of L-shaped cable
Hardware quality: Quite sturdy!
-Nitpicks:
Tablet drivers: Well featured!
-Nitpicks: No anti-ghosting on shortcut buttons
Drawing test results: Pretty good results.
-Nitpicks: Wobbly slow ruler lines the more you tilt your pen
Actual drawing experience: Fantastic!
-Nitpicks:
Overall: A viable tablet option for 80 USD if you don’t use the pen at an “extreme” angle.
My verdict:
-This is a completely viable tablet which only has an issue with line wobble the more you tilt the pen. Most people will not use the pen at extreme angles where the line wobble is horrible, but if you know you will, this tablet is not recommended for you.
If you can afford to pay 20 USD more, I would suggest the Huion H1060P instead as it does not have an issue with line wobble at all, however, the Huion H950P is quite a decent tablet as long as you know you will not be tilting the pen as far over as you can.
Why I do not recommend this tablet
(May 06, 2019) Update: A reader of my site has brought to my attention that this tablet is actually completely viable, despite the line wobble I frequently refer to.
The important point which was brought up is that the line wobble is not bad at “normal” pen angles, meaning almost anyone who uses this tablet will not have a problem with line wobble. As such, I actually have no reason to recommend against this tablet anymore.
I will be correcting the conclusions in this review now that I have realized that. (I will not be correcting the whole review, mostly just the conclusions made.)
You can read about the issues which this tablet used to have in this post: The issues the Huion H640P/H950P used to have
I explain in detail why I do not recommend this tablet in this post: Why I do not recommend the Huion H640P/H950P
However, the short version is that it is a “risky” tablet.
It’s possible that you will get a version with these issues: Non-linear pen pressure, bad click sensitivity, and extremely wobbly slow lines. The first two issues depend on whether you get an H950P from an old or new production batch, but the tablet will have the wobbly slow line issue for sure either way.
Basically, no matter how lucky you are, you are getting an imperfect tablet.
I know for a fact that if you pay 20 USD more to get the Huion H1060P, you will get a tablet with none of these issues, so I see absolutely no point in cheaping out and taking the risk with the H950P.
Specifications at a glance
Price: 79.99 USD (when this review was written)
Active Area: 8.7 x 5.4 inches
Pen Type: Battery-free
Pen Buttons: 2 side buttons, no eraser
Pen Pressure: 8192
Pen Tilt Sensitivity: Yes, +-60 levels
Shortcut Keys: 8 buttons
Multi-touch: No
What’s in the box?
The tablet comes in a simple white box with a pleasing drawing on the front.
The things that come in the box:
- Huion H950P tablet
- Battery-free pen
- Pen stand
- Tablet cable (USB type-A to Micro-USB)
- Pen nib replacements x8
- User manual
- Driver installation CD shaped instruction card
- Warranty card
- “Thank you” card
This tablet has a simple design with the tablet surface covering most of the front of the tablet. The tablet itself is not too big, so it should have no problems fitting into most sizes of bags.
Despite being so thin, there is almost no flex at all when doing a simple twist test by gripping both ends of the tablet and twisting.
The surface of the tablet has a fairly smooth finish, although it does have a bit of texture. It may take a bit of time to get used to if you’re used to rougher textures, but it is great once you’re used to it.
One thing you should do right away with this tablet is take a microfiber cloth and lightly clean the surface of the tablet before drawing. There was a bit of a scratchy feel to the surface before I wiped it off once, so I suggest that you do the same before starting to draw on it.
The back of the tablet has the usual information sticker and 4 rubber feet. The rubber feet do a fairly good job of keeping the tablet in place unless they’re extremely dusty.
The front and back edge of the tablet have a slightly curved, but mostly unaltered shape. Since it’s somewhat rounded, it won’t dig into your wrist too hard while drawing.
The shortcut keys on this tablet are very nice to use. They are tactile and give a satisfying but not too loud click.
If I were to nitpick, I would say they should have made the bumps different on the buttons beside each other so you can tell which one is which, instead of using the exact same dot on both. For instance, use one line and one dot instead.
Again, just a very unimportant nitpick. The buttons themselves feel fantastic to use.
One thing to note is that Huion shortcut keys do not have anti-ghosting capabilities. In other words, you cannot use two buttons at the same time. In most cases, this does not matter, but you should keep this in mind if it affects you.
The micro-USB port on the tablet is not centered, and is closer to the top edge. The included micro-USB cable is an L-shaped cable.
The tablet plugs into a USB type-A port on your computer.
As the cable is Micro-USB, the cable can only be plugged in on direction, so it may get in the way of some left-handed users.
There is a physical switch on the opposite side of the tablet which allows you to toggle whether the shortcut keys are on or off.
This can be useful if you want to disable expresskeys without going through the drivers to do so, but I personally do not see many use cases for this.
The Huion H950P uses the same PW100 battery-free pen as a few of their other tablets. It has a wide semi-soft/semi-hard rubber grip which is quite nice to hold and use. It has a decent weight despite being a battery-free pen which are notorious for being light due to not having a battery inside.
Holding this pen is very comfortable and I have no complaints about it.
The buttons are mostly flush with the surface of the pen, but they are very easy to find and use without looking due to the difference in feel of the rubber grip and plastic buttons.
The top of the pen does not having anything.
The pen stand is a small cone which lets you stand the pen upright or sideways on top of it.
The bottom of the pen stand is purely plastic, so it will slide on hard surfaces. With that said, it does not actually slide that much though so there shouldn’t be any problems where it will just run away from you.
The inside of the pen stand is where the replacement pen nibs are. The pen nib remover is built into the bottom of the stand with the instructions on how to use it engraved into the plastic on the bottom. But for those who don’t understand the pictures, you stick your pen nib into the hole, lever it to the side a bit, and pull the nib out. I suggest not doing this unless you have to since this type of pen nib remover is known to scratch the side of the pen nib if you lever it too hard.
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 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.
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, although the save and open buttons are named a bit ambiguously (they’re the import config and export config buttons in the “About” section).
If you see a “Require Admin” button along the bottom of the driver when you first run it, click it to give your driver proper administrator privileges so that it can make changes to system files when necessary. However, I have not had problems running the drivers without clicking it so I’m not sure what it changes.
The Press Keys tab allows you to customize the functions mapped to your expresskeys. As you can see above, the hotkeys menu has keyboard shortcuts, pen clicks, and some “switch” functions available. The drop down menu for the keyboard shortcuts has every keyboard key that I can think of.
The newest Huion drivers now includes mouse left double click as an option. A small addition, but one that has been asked for quite a bit.
Like I mentioned before, the Huion shortcut keys do not have anti-ghosting capabilities. In other words, you cannot use two buttons at the same time. In most cases, this does not matter, but you should keep this in mind if you think it well affect your workflow.
Every button will work at the same time as the pen nib though, including the pen buttons.
The Digital Pen tab allows you to customize the pen buttons and the pen pressure curve. The pen buttons have the same amount of configuration as the expresskeys.
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 customize the monitor your tablet is mapped to, and the size of the active area your tablet uses. Pick your monitor from the drop down menu, then click the Full Area button, and then click the Screen Ratio button to properly adjust your tablet area to match your monitor.
There is also the option to rotate your tablet input for left-handed use.
Drawing tests
These pen tests are all done with the same settings for both the canvas and the pens. These tests are only done in Clip Studio Paint as that is the only program where I totally understand how to remove all unwanted variables.
If you are worried about whether this tablet will work with your art program, don’t be afraid to contact support to ask them directly.
-The canvas will always be a 3000x3000px 300dpi page (the above test page is a 3000x6000px 300dpi page, so just two pages stuck together).
-The test pens are mostly all 100px linear pressure curve pens. Pen pressure for size and/or opacity is enabled based on the test.
-The slow ruler line test uses a 10px no pen pressure pen to clearly show wobble and jitter. I also use a 50px pen pressure enabled pen to see the visibility of wobble/jitter with pen pressure is enabled.
-The IAF (Initial Activation Force) test uses a 300px linear pressure pen to show the thinnest lines possible, as well as demonstrate the IAF of the tablet.
1) Scribble Test – Grade: Pass
Test pen 1 – 100px – pen pressure: size
Test pen 2 – 100px – pen pressure: size+opacity
For my pen tests, I always start out with a few pen pressure scribbles to see if I can do some nice squiggly lines with increasing pen pressure. I also do some back and forth shading and some spirals with increasing pen pressure.
With the Huion H950P, I had no problems doing these scribbles. I didn’t have any problems controlling my strokes and making both thin and thick lines was relatively easy. This tablet gets an easy pass here.
2) Slow Ruler Line Test – Grade: Fail
Test pen 1 – 10px – pen pressure: none
Test pen 2 – 50px – pen pressure: size
The slow ruler line tests done with a no pen pressure pen were very good with an upright pen. However, the lines became very noticeably wobbly when tilting the pen to more “normal” angles, and they become ridiculously bad at extreme pen angles.
I do not think the wobble is bad enough to get in the way of drawing at a “normal” pen angle, so I believe this tablet will be fine to use for most people.
However, a very important thing to note is that this tablet has pen tilt! This means that quite a few people will be using the pen at an “extreme” angle when using the tilt functionality, which in turn means that the extreme line wobble will actually start to show in their art.
I want to give this tablet a pass-ish here only because it is fine at “normal” pen angles. However, since this tablet has pen tilt, I will give it a fail because it should be good at all pen angles to not interfere with pen tilt.
3) Quick Hatching Test – Grade: Pass
Test pen 1 – 100px – pen pressure: size
The quick hatching test is to check whether the tablet keeps up with pen inputs. Usually, the only way to fail this section is if the pen is noticeably laggy and causes unwanted inputs like fishhooks at the beginning or end of the line.
As you can see, this tablet appears to have no problems with fishhooks. I also never noticed the cursor lagging noticeably, so it gets a pass here.
4) Short Release Taper Test – Grade: Pass
Test pen 1 – 100px – pen pressure: size
This test is meant to see the smoothness of the pen pressure taper when going from max to min pressure quickly. Basically, you press your pen down hard then flick to the side to see how smoothly the stroke tapers.
With the Huion H950P, the tapers look very nice and appear to have no problems with jaggedness. This tablet gets a pass here.
5) Pen Pressure Control/Transition Test – Grade: Pass
Test pen 1 – 100px – pen pressure: size+opacity
This section is to test the smoothness of the transitions in pen pressure.
-The circles at the top are one of Youtuber Brad Colbow’s tests. It is used to check if you can properly control the pen pressure all the way around a circle. If there is a pressure jump, some circles will feel impossible to control due to that jump.
-The lines at the bottom are slow strokes done with smooth increases or decreases to pen pressure in mind. The arrow points in the direction which the stroke was done, and the smoothness of the gradients show how smooth the pen pressure transitions.
In terms of the pen pressure control circles, I had no problems doing all the different circles smoothly. They showed no signs of pen pressure jumping.
I will give this tablet a pass here since there don’t appear to be any noticeable issues in the pen pressure transitions either. You could see my lines wobbly a bit for the shorter tests though, but that’s not related to this test.
6) Initial Activation Force & Lightest Pen Pressure Test – Grade: Pass
Test pen 1 – 300px – pen pressure: size
This test tries to demonstrate the IAF of the tablet, and also shows the lowest possible pen pressure the tablet is capable of producing consistently.
IAF is the amount of force necessary to cause the pen to output a line. Ideally, your tablet will have an extremely low IAF where the pen will output a line with the least amount of force possible.
A high IAF causes issues such as light pen taps not registering as clicks, and the inability to sketch very lightly, both of which become quite annoying the more you experience it.
For this test page, the squiggly lines should begin right on the start line.
-If the line begins right on the start line, this indicates that the IAF is extremely low (low IAF is best) and the line just appears naturally without effort.
-On the other hand, if the line does not begin on the start line and instead begins further along the stroke, this means that the IAF is high so I needed to search for the IAF by increasing my force little by little until I finally started outputting a line.
An example of the ideal test page is the Huion New 1060 Plus (2048) IAF test page which I included above for comparison. Almost all the lines begin right on the start line meaning it has extremely low IAF, and the lines are almost transparent showing that the tablet is capable of drawing extremely light pen pressures.
The Huion H950P has a fairly low IAF which I could find pretty much right away. However, it’s clearly not “perfect” because I mostly couldn’t start it right on the start line.
Still, the IAF is low enough that I never noticed it when tapping options or sketching lightly.
In terms of the lightest pen pressure, I could get pretty thin lines with the 300px IAF test pen. It certainly isn’t as amazing thin as the Huion New 1060 Plus (2048) IAF test page which is the ideal, but this thinness is very good and is more than acceptable.
Overall, the Huion H950P has decently low IAF and is able to draw very thin lines consistently. This tablet gets a pass here.
7) Pen Tilt Test – Pass
Test pen 1 – 100px – pen tilt: opacity
Test pen 2 – 100px – flat pen – pen tilt: direction
This test shows the smoothness of the pen tilt by gradually tilting the pen while slowly moving the pen to the side. This section also includes scribbles using the pen direction determined by pen tilt.
As you can see in the smoothness test, the pen tilt transitions on the Huion H950P are not perfectly smooth. You can certainly see the steps in the gradient, but that’s expected with only +-60 levels of pen tilt.
The pen tilt is actually quite good compared to other current tablets, so I think we can safely give this tablet a pass here.
Overall
So all in all, the drawing test results are:
1) Scribble Test – Pass
2) Slow Ruler Line Test – Fail
3) Quick Hatching Test – Pass
4) Short Release Taper Test – Pass
5) Pen Pressure Control/Transition Test – Pass
6) Initial Activation Force & Lightest Pen Pressure Test – Pass
Non-Vital Drawing Tests:
7) Pen Tilt Test – Pass
Ideally, all the above tests should have at least a “Pass-ish” for their grades because the most vital function of a drawing tablet is to draw properly and predictably. Failing any of these tests means that it doesn’t do that.
The drawing experience!
My actual drawing experience with the Huion H950P was pretty good overall. It’s a shame that this tablet has such bad line wobble when everything else about it is actually quite fantastic.
My way of drawing with quick strokes actually avoids the wobbly line issue, so it didn’t negatively impact my drawing experience that much. However, I did notice it at times when I was trying to draw certain parts of my drawing with slower strokes.
The stroke control for this tablet is very good and it tapers very well for both short and long strokes.
Of course, the pen pressure isn’t as customizable as XP-Pen’s, but it’s really nice nonetheless. In fact, the default pen pressure is so good that I really don’t care that there is no customizable pressure curve.
The Huion H950P has pen tilt functionality which should be a good thing, but it’s a bit unfortunate that pen tilt requires you to tilt the pen, which is specifically when the H950P is at its worst it in terms of line wobble.
My opinion is that for a device with pen tilt functionality, line wobble which changes based on the angle of the pen is no good at all.
Tilt Firmware Update – For people with a non-tilt H950P
The tilt induction function is a upgraded function of the device. If you order the H950P from our official online shop, you will receive the upgraded model so that you can use this function directly. If you order it from other channels like Amazon, or if you have already owned one H950P, you can send your serial number, order number and your OS version to service@huion.com and they will send you a firmware upgrade package. Follow their guidelines to install it and then you can also use the tilt induction function.
Conclusion
Like I said near the beginning in the “How good is this tablet?” section, the Huion H950P is quite good overall if you ignore the line wobble which occurs when using the pen tilted at an “extreme” angle.
Do I recommend it with the line wobble? Not really, but it is certainly a viable tablet for people who use it at a “normal” pen angle.
However, I know that the one step up Huion H1060P has absolutely no line wobble for just 20 USD more, and I personally recommend anyone considering the Huion H950P to get the H1060P instead if they’re willing to pay a bit more.
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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