Huion Kamvas Pro 24 Review: A Flagship 4K Pen Display for a Lot Less

The Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) is Huion's flagship pen display: a high-resolution graphics display that delivers most of the benefits of a Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 at about half the price. In the two months I've spent using it on-and-off in preparation for this review, I've come to three important conclusions: (1) this is an excellent product, (2) a large 4K pen display is the best way to edit your photos, and (3) I can't realistically use this display as my daily driver.

Before unpacking the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) from its box and setting it up on my desk, I'd forgotten how much I love editing photos on a big pen display that takes up your whole field of vision and gives you such granular control. I'd also forgotten how frustrating it is to have your entire desk taken up by a single-use device that's so big you have to pack it away every time you're done using it, only to set it back up a few days or a few hours later when it's time to edit another shoot.

This has nothing to do with the product's performance, but it's important to point out as a piece of buying advice from the get-go, because anyone who is considering a 24-inch graphics display has to understand what they're getting into.

If you have the room on your desk or you're able to set this up as a functional secondary display by mounting it on very flexible monitor arm, then great -- I don't want to play down the benefits of using a big high-quality display as your canvas. But if you live in a smaller home where you edit on your kitchen table or your tiny desk is already being eaten by your current photo editing display, then you should probably consider something smaller like the XP-Pen Artist Pro 16 or the Kamvas Pro 16 (2.5K) instead.

Alas, I fall into the second category. So for the past couple of months, I had to haul this thing out pretty much every time I wanted to edit a photo shoot. Fortunately, the actual editing experience was excellent, and now that I'm done complaining about my desk space woes, I'm here to tell you that the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) is an excellent pen display that's worth every penny. In fact, I think it's worth a lot more pennies than Huion is charging.

Design and Build Quality

The design and build quality of the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) is definitely "flagship" grade. It's a surprisingly heavy display that feels solid and features a clean "minimalist" design aesthetic that borrows a lot from Wacom's Cintiq Pro 24. Actually, let's be honest: it basically is a Cintiq Pro 24 with slightly thinner bezels. Other than the display technology itself, which we'll talk about in a second, the two products are extremely similar in both good ways and bad.

In the pros column: the display housing is well-built, with convenient flip-out "feet" built into the back and the ability to connect with HDMI + USB, DisplayPort + USB, or go single-cable via USB-C. There's also a two-port USB Type-A hub and an audio port that you can use to plug headphones or speakers directly into the pen display. In the cons column: neither display comes with built-in express keys, opting for a design the company describes as "minimalist." There's also no adjustable stand included in the box, so you're stuck with the 20° drawing angle provided by the built-in feet.

Like the Cintiq Pro 24, the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) makes up for the lack of built-in function keys by shipping with an external remote the company calls the Mini Keydial KD100. It's a wireless express key remote with 18 buttons and a mechanical dial that can switch between three different settings:

The Keydial lacks the solid metal build quality of Wacom's ExpressKey remote or Xencelabs' Quick Keys remote, but I actually found it to be more functional. Because it's designed to mimmic the number pad on a full-sized keyboard, it was much easier to get used to the button placement and use the remote without constantly looking over to see which button I was actually pressing. It's also worth noting that an external "remote" like this is more convenient for left-handed users.

All of that said, I still prefer pen displays with built-in function keys, and I like the way Huion and XP Pen have tackled the left-handed issue before. Both the regular Kamvas Pro 24 and XP-Pen's Artist 24 Pro feature dual rows of function keys: one on each side of the display. Neither of these older displays can match the quality of the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K), but I find it more immersive when I don't have to keep track of an external remote that takes up room on my desk (or display), uses up one of my USB-A ports for the wireless receiver, and needs to be charged from time to time.

Overall, I'm happy with the design and the build quality of the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K), especially the included Keydial remote. I just wish Huion had done a bit of innovating instead of sticking so close to Wacom's Cintiq Pro design language. For all of the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K)'s technical improvements over the regular Kamvas Pro 24, the choice to go with such a sleek, minimalist design arguably takes away a little usability, and there are no exciting or quirky design elements to make it stand out.

Fortunately, this feeling that the display isn't anything "special" tends to fade away the moment you turn it on and lay eyes on the gorgeous, 4K QLED display.

Display Quality

The Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) covers 95.9% of the AdobeRGB gamut (left) and 86.7% of DCI-P3 (right).

The most important and impressive piece of technology packed inside the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) pen display is the display itself: a QLED (AKA "Quantum Dot") 4K panel with 10-bit color, impressive color accuracy and gamut coverage, and "support for HDR."

Huion really emphasizes the HDR support, a first for a pen display, but I've put it in quotes for a reason. With a maximum brightness of 220 nits and no local dimming, the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) isn't equipped for proper HDR editing. We at PetaPixel have maintained for quite some time that anything below 600 nits isn't really HDR, as it would not be bright enough to provide proper contrast against the darks of an image. It's nice to be able to view HDR content, and the increased contrast of a QLED display helps with that, but this feature is 80% marketing and only 20% useful.

What actually stands out about this display is the gamut coverage, color accuracy, uniformity, and the amount of control that Huion gives you through its on-screen menus. These are the features that make this one of the best panels you'll find in a pen display.

In terms of gamut coverage, the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) hit 99.7% sRGB, 95.9% Adobe RGB, and 86.7% DCI-P3 in our testing, with a maximum Delta E of 2.2 and an average Delta E of just over 0.6.

This is a very solid performance, especially when you combine it with the extensive on-screen controls that Huion's latest Kamvas Pro displays provide. Just like we saw in the Kamvas Pro 16 (2.5K), the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) features on-screen menus that allow you to dial in brightness, contrast, and individual RGB gains so you can properly calibrate your white point.

I'd love to have a built-in LUT for proper hardware calibration -- a feature we've yet to see in a pen display -- but this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Once I adjusted the RGB gains to match D65, I was able to get the measured vs expected white point Delta E below 1.2 and produce a perceptual match between this and the ASUS PA32UCG that I use for serious photo editing, making for a seamless experience when transitioning from mouse-and-keyboard editing in Lightroom to pen-on-display editing in Photoshop.

The screen was also impressively uniform. We ran a 35-patch test (7×5) and found only 13 patches that fell below the recommended tolerance (yellow outline) and none that fell below nominal tolerance. I've tested several "creator" displays that performed worse than this, so credit where credit is due: for color-critical work, the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) makes the grade.

Uniformity test results for the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K). Click for full resolution image.

The last display feature worth noting doesn't have to do with performance, but usability. The screen on the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) is fully laminated -- meaning the glass surface is fused to the display to reduce parallax -- and Huion opted for anti-glare etched glass instead of the cheaper anti-glare coatings you find on many displays. This makes for a nice pen feel with a little bit of bite, and it doesn't cause the kind of rainbows/haloing you experience with some anti-glare coatings. Both are necessary features for a flagship pen display, and it's nice to see Huion didn't cut any corners.

It's safe to say I was surprised by the quality of the new QLED display. Many of the large pen displays I've used or tested in the past suffered from poor contrast, mediocre resolution, crappy gamut coverage, and/or color artifacts caused by the anti-glare coatings. None of this was the case with the Huion display, and while I would have loved to see a peak brightness of 400 or even 600 nits to help justify the claim that this supports HDR content, as a photo editor who hardly ever touches the HDR switch anyway, I never felt let down by this display.

As Huion tries to expand its user base by wooing photo and video editors, upgrading to a high-quality, color-accurate panel and giving users more control over their display settings was a very smart move.

Stylus Quality

The stylus is where Huion has done the least to improve when you compare it to the options from Wacom, Xencelabs, and XP-Pen. It's not that the PW517 pen that ships with the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) is bad, it's just… bland. There's no eraser, only two buttons, and the same old specs as everybody else: it's a battery-free EMR pen with 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity, 5080 LPI resolution, and 60% tilt support.

Part of the problem is that the EMR pens used by all the major graphics tablet brands, Huion included, have gotten so good that you have to do something interesting to stand out. That's why Xencelabs offers you two pens -- a 3-button thick pen and a 2-button thin pen -- and XP-Pen recently debuted the "X3" pen that's thinner, better built, and offers a lower initial activation force than previous iterations. By comparison, Huion has just sort of stuck with what has worked. The PW517 stylus benefits from some new felt-tip nib options and "PenTech 3.0" for improved stability while drawing, but is otherwise unchanged from its predecessor in any noticeable way.

There's nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing particularly right about it either. This is one area where the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K), as the company's flagship offering, would benefit from a high-end pen that offers some significant improvements over Huion's previous generation… to say nothing of the competition.

A Cintiq Pro 24 for Half Price

Huion threw everything it could at the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) and it shows: this is a proper 4K flagship pen display that goes spec-for-spec with the Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 while shrinking the bezels, packing in a high-quality Samsung QLED display, and cutting the price by $700.

It's not a perfect display, but overall, my impressions were 90% positive. I think the pros and cons list bears this out:

Pros

• 4K resolution
• Solid color accuracy and gamut coverage
• Full control over your display settings
• Fully laminated display with minimal parallax
• External keypad with mechanical dial
• Built-in USB Type-A Hub and Audio Out
• Single-cable connectivity via USB-C
• Offers both HDMI and DP ports

Cons

• Built-in feet limit you to a single drawing angle
• 1-inch bezels are still pretty thick for a modern display
• No built-in shortcut keys
• No touchscreen functionality
• PW517 pen isn't anything special

My only major complaint is that Huion went too far trying to beat Wacom at its own game. By opting for the same "minimalist" aesthetic of the Cintiq Pro series, Huion has left out some nice-to-have features that might have helped the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) stand out. As it stands, the door remains open for a competitor to release its own excellent 4K pen display that includes these missing features, or at least does something new or different or exciting.

In the meantime, I can confidently recommend the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) for anyone who wants a top-tier, high-resolution pen display for color-critical work. In fact, as of this writing, I'd have a hard time recommending anything else.

Unfortunately, I can't use this display as my daily driver because I simply don't have the space on my desk or any way to mount it that would actually make sense. If you're like me, the smaller, cheaper Kamvas Pro 16 (2.5K) or XP-Pen Artist Pro 16 might make more sense. But if size isn't an issue, editing photos on a large 4K pen display is an amazing experience that just got a lot more affordable, and we have Huion to thank for that.

Are There Alternatives?

Until Huion unveiled the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) there was only one 4K 24-inch pen display on the market: the Wacom Cintiq Pro 24. As I've already mentioned several times, that display is much more expensive ($2,000 without touch or $2,400 with touch functionality), and yet it doesn't offer any must-have features or intriguing add-ons that you don't already get with the Huion. Wacom's build quality may be a notch better, and it claims slightly higher AdobeRGB coverage (99% vs 96%), but the feature set is otherwise identical.

Your other 24-inch and 22-inch pen display options are all QHD resolution or 1080p, putting them in another category entirely. They include the 2K XP-Pen Artist 24 Pro for $630, the 1080p Wacom Cintiq 22 for $1,200, and Huion's own 2.5K Kamvas Pro 24 for $720. These are all solid pen displays in their own right, but none can match the screen quality, gamut coverage, and overall build quality of a flagship display like the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K).

We anticipate that XP-Pen will put out a 4K 24-inch pen display soon-ish, Xencelabs has hinted that pen displays are in their future, and Wacom may update or replace the Cintiq Pro 24 sometime within the next year or two, but all of that is speculation. At least for now, your choices are somewhat limited.

Should You Buy It?

Absolutely. If you want a 24-inch 4K pen display and you're willing to try something that isn't made by Wacom, then you can save a bundle without sacrificing in any significant way. As far as I can tell, the Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) doesn't cut any corners that should seriously push you to consider the Cintiq Pro 24 instead. If anything, the improved contrast of the QLED display might make this the better option even if these two pen displays were much closer in price.

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XP-Pen Artist Pro 16 Review: A Great Portable and Affordable Pen Display

XP-Pen's new Artist Pro 16 is one of the most compelling entry-level graphics displays on the market. It's lightweight, well-built, highly customizable, color-accurate, and all for a price that will make Wacom owners blush. It's not a perfect product, but no other Full HD pen display on the market offers this kind of experience and build quality for just $450.

Modern pen displays from companies like Wacom, Huion, and XP-Pen come in a few different tiers. The easiest way to tell them apart is usually resolution and size: entry-level displays typically come with Full HD screens in either 13- or 16-inch varieties, mid-range displays come with 2 or 2.5K displays in 16- and 24-inch varieties, and the top-tier models pretty much all sport 4K displays no matter what size you choose.

That puts the new-and-improved XP-Pen Artist Pro 16 squarely in the entry-level category. But where other Full HD pen displays like the entry-level Wacom One tend to cut corners on build quality, stylus quality, and color accuracy, the Artist Pro 16 provides a premium experience in all of the above.

Let me put it this way: as of this writing, the XP-Pen Artist Pro 16 is my favorite pen display to use for day-to-day photo editing, and that includes the $1,500 Cintiq Pro 16. That's high praise.

Design and Build Quality

The new Artist Pro 16 is basically a rebranded Innovator 16: the "slim, swift, and sleek" 16-inch pen display that XP-Pen released in June of 2020. Obviously, the ultra-slim Innovator 16 struck a chord with buyers, and we're glad that XP-Pen has decided to adopt the same approach with the Artist Pro series -- both the design and built quality of the Innovator 16 are a huge step up from most entry-level pen displays.

The housing is solid metal with a "space gray" finish and measures just 1/4-inch thick. It's solid, unlike so many of its entry-level competitors, which makes it that much more portable. I probably wouldn't hesitate to throw this display in my backpack and take it on location.

The only thing that would possibly hold me back from doing so is the clunky three-way cable that you have to use to actually connect and power the thing. A single USB-C connection on the display forks into an HDMI cable for display input, a USB Type-A cable for pen input, and another USB Type-A cable for power. The fact that there is no USB-C to USB-C single-cable solution is baffling to me, and one of the only major cons that hold this display back.

Customizability is excellent for a display this size. On the left-hand side of the screen is a row of eight programmable function keys and a mechanical dial, which itself surrounds a touch-sensitive surface that acts as a secondary dial.

I really like this design. The buttons feel great and the mechanical dial is my favorite way to adjust brush size, zoom in and out, or rotate the canvas, but I could have done without the touch dial. Because the mechanical dial is relatively small, my fat fingers accidentally activated the touch dial all the time, which eventually forced me to turn it off in the settings. I suppose it's better to have the option, but at this small size, I found it more cumbersome than useful.

My only other complaint is that the mechanical dial has no "click" mechanism. It's a smooth rotation, and I'd prefer some tactile feedback since the dial basically just presses " CTRL + + " or " CTRL + ] " when you're zooming or adjusting brush size. Without any feedback, I often overshoot and have to adjust backward, since there's a slight delay between the mechanical input and the digital output.

These are, of course, nitpicks. The very fact that it has a physical dial and eight programmable express keys already puts the Artist Pro 16 at the top of the heap. Its main competition either doesn't have a dial or, in the case of Wacom's current lineup of pen displays, no buttons whatsoever.

Overall, I was delighted by both the build quality and design of the new Artist Pro 16. Its solid metal construction and polished aesthetic put it right up there with much more expensive, high-end 16-inch and 24-inch pen displays that I've reviewed, and make it one the only pen displays I'd feel comfortable traveling with.

I genuinely hope that the entire Artist Pro lineup benefits from a similar shift in design and build quality moving forward.

Screen Quality

The screen on the Artist Pro 16 benefits from two big pros: it's fully laminated, and it boasts a surprisingly wide color gamut for an entry-level option that costs just $450.

"Full lamination" means that the touch layer of the tablet has been bonded directly to the LCD screen underneath, minimizing the distance between the surface that detects your pen input and the display itself. This helps to minimize parallax, which makes a huge difference when you're trying to do something precise like cutting out a selection using the Pen Tool.

As for the gamut, the Artist Pro 16 benefits from a very slight upgrade over the Innovator 16. Where the Innovator 16 claimed 125% sRGB, the Artist Pro 16 allegedly covers 133% sRGB. But these numbers need some explaining.

Without getting into the weeds, just know that XP-Pen and all of its competitors like to engage in the dubious practice of sharing gamut volume instead of gamut coverage because it makes their products sound better.

Gamut coverage maxes out at 100%: it literally indicates what percentage of a particular color gamut your monitor can actually produce. If any part of the sRGB color space falls outside of the display's native panel, then gamut coverage is less than 100% sRGB.

Gamut volume, on the other hand, takes into account how many colors the display can produce above and beyond the borders of a given color space, and it's expressed as a percentage that includes those additional colors. That means that a display can have less than 100% sRGB coverage while reaching well over 100% sRGB volume.

That's exactly what we have here.

In our testing, the Artist Pro 16 was able to cover 93.3% sRGB, 91.3% Adobe RGB, and 81.1% DCI-P3 with a maximum Delta E of 2.93 and an average of just 0.13. That's a great result, especially at such a low price, but you can see why XP-Pen decided to report gamut volume instead of gamut coverage.

When you look at the panel's native gamut, you can see that the display's blue primary isn't saturated enough to show the most vibrant blues in the sRGB color space, even though it covers way more than sRGB elsewhere. That's why it can't quite hit 100% sRGB, not really:

The XP-Pen Artist Pro 16's native panel gamut (colored outline) can't quite cover all of sRGB (dotted line) in the blue region.

The other downside of this panel is the lack of control. You can only adjust brightness, so what you see is what you get when it comes to both color temperature and white point.

For our unit, the color temperature hovered around 6,675K and the white point was a bit off-balance towards the green. That balance gets better and better the lower we put the brightness, but I found anything less than 50 on the brightness scale was just too dim to comfortably use in a well-lit room.

For professional users, we would recommend picking one brightness setting, calibrating the display at that level, and then never touching this setting again. This will give you the best overall results. The display is more than accurate enough for web-based color-critical work in terms of Delta E, just be aware of its limitations in the blue region.

Stylus Quality

In addition to the slightly improved screen, the other new feature that sets the Artist Pro 16 apart from the Innovator 16 is XP-Pen's new X3 "smartchip" stylus.

I'll be honest with you, this upgrade alone is reason enough for me to go with the Artist Pro 16 over some of XP-Pen's other options. XP-Pen's other stylus is fine, but just like Wacom and Huion's EMR pens, it's kind of fat and uncomfortable for me to use. In contrast, the new X3 stylus is much thinner, sleeker, and feels a lot more like an Apple Pencil or the thin pen that comes with the Xencelabs pen tablet.

I find this form factor much more comfortable to use for long editing sessions, and XP-Pen claims that the X3 chip inside offers other benefits besides. Apparently, it produces a 10-fold decrease in initial activation force, bringing the IAF of this pen down to just 3 grams, and XP-Pen claims the chip is also more resistant to electromagnetic interference.

That second bit is actually interesting to me, as my standing desk mechanism has occasionally sent the cursor flying while I've been using some cheaper pen tablets. It's a niche problem to be sure, but anything that makes the pen more reliable is a bonus in my book.

In terms of real-world use, I honestly didn't notice a huge difference between this pen and any other pen display I've used. I'm sure if I had them side-by-side I'd notice some minor improvement in IAF, but for me, the biggest reason to praise the X3 smartchip pen is simply the improvement in form factor and reliability.

That, alone, makes the Artist Pro 16 a worthwhile buy over the slightly cheaper Innovator 16. Everything else is just spec sheet fodder.

A Portable, Affordable Pen Display

Overall, I found the new Artist Pro 16 to be a near-perfect combination of portability and features at an irresistible price. I can certainly find things to gripe about, but the fact remains: for just $450, XP-Pen is selling a pen display that's more convenient and enjoyable to use than some $1,000 or $1,500 displays that I have available to me.

Pros

• Thin, light and sturdy
• Decent gamut coverage with excellent Delta E
• Improved "X3 smartchip" stylus
• Includes function keys, physical dial, and touch dial
• Great price

Cons

• Only 1080p resolution
• No control over RGB gains or color temperature
• Three-way cable is bulky and awkward
• HDMI-only display connection
• No included feet or stand

The more pen displays and pen tablets I use, the more I tend to value portability and customizability over size or resolution. Maybe that's why I enjoyed the Artist Pro 16 so much. Whatever the case, it delivers build quality, design, and performance that far outstrips its $450 price, and XP-Pen deserves to be praised for it.

For the first time in … ever? … it might actually be cheaper for photographers to opt for a high-quality pen display instead of a high-end pen tablet. That's awesome.

Are There Alternatives

In this price range, the main competition for the Artist Pro 16 is Huion's Full-HD Kamvas 16 and Kamvas Pro 16 or the Wacom One we reviewed last year. Unfortunately, neither of these options can compete in terms of build, design, or color gamut.

From there, the options quickly get more expensive. The Full HD Wacom Cintiq 16 offers slightly improved color gamut but it's not fully laminated, it's bulkier, and it costs $650; the Huion Kamvas Pro 16 4K and Kamvas Pro 16 Plus 4K are $830 and $900, respectively. Ironically none of these more expensive options offer a single express key or adjustment dial, forcing you to spend an additional $40 to $100 on a separate shortcut key remote.

For now, the Artist Pro 16's particular combination of features is hard to beat at its price.

Should You Buy It

Absolutely. Most photographers have probably never considered a pen display for their photo editing. For a long time, the cost simply outweighed any benefit that you might get over a traditional pen tablet like the trusty Wacom Intuos Pro line.

Options like the XP-Pen Artist Pro 16 turn that whole equation on its head.

For the first time, you can actually get a high-quality, rugged, ultra-thin, ultra-portable pen display for less than the cost of a good pen tablet. Whether or not you'd prefer this style of editing is for you to decide, but cost should no longer be a factor.

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