The Wacom Bamboo Capture is the sweet spot in the company's new lineup of drawing tablets. At $99.99, the Capture offers more pressure sensitivity than the prior Bamboo Pen & Touch CTH460 (4 stars), as well as a slimmer design and an impressive software bundle. But in a cynical move, Wacom removed the eraser, and is now saving it for the new Bamboo Create CTH470 ($199.99), which is twice the size and twice the price; just make sure your style of working doesn't require one in the usual spot before purchase.

Design, Product Line, and Setup
The Bamboo Capture measures 6.9 by 10.9 by 0.4 inches (HWD). Wacom streamlined the design, but only partially; while it's slimmer, and there are fewer cut lines and buttons than on the Pen and Touch CTH460, there's now an extra space on one side that contains the same four programmable buttons as before. Wacom spruced up the look by adding some extra geometric surfaces to the buttons.

The entire tablet is still made of plastic, with a glossy plastic bar next to the buttons, a blue LED light indicating a live connection, and a hard textured surface around the tablet's edges. The Bamboo Capture is mostly silver, with a black accent bar containing the buttons, a black plastic stylus, and a black nylon pen holder. The pleasantly tacky drawing surface measures 5.8 by 3.6 inches, which is the same as before. This time around, you can detach the USB cord, which helps if you need to move the tablet on your desk for some reason.

Speaking of which, Wacom broke the Bamboo line into three new tablets. The Bamboo Connect CTL470 costs $79.99; it's a basic model intended for collaborating, sketching out ideas, marking up documents, and taking notes. It includes Autodesk SketchBook Express 2011. The Bamboo Capture CTH470 ($99.99), the subject of this review, adds multi-touch, compatibility with the company's $39.99 Wireless Option, and full versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 and Nik Color Efex Pro Filters 3.0, which is a good deal in and of itself. The Bamboo Create CTH670 ($199.99) is a larger version that doubles the size of the drawing area, in order to accommodate broader brush strokes. The Create also adds an eraser to the stylus, and you get a copy of Corel Painter Essentials 4.0, plus all of the above software (with Photoshop Elements bumped to version 9, presumably thanks to a licensing issue).

All three tablets are compatible with Windows 7, Vista, and XP, as well as Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later. Installing the Bamboo Capture is very simple: with your PC booted on and at the Windows desktop, connect the USB cable, insert the bundled DVD, and follow the on-screen instructions; it takes longer to install than the Bamboo Connect, thanks to the Capture's much better software bundle. I had no problem installing the Bamboo Capture on a Lenovo ThinkPad L420 Core i3-powered laptop with 8GB RAM and Windows 7 Service Pack 1 installed.

Drawing, Multi-Touch, and Conclusions
Wacom has been producing drawing surfaces for the better part of two decades, so even the inexpensive Bamboo Capture works reliably. At 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity, the Bamboo Capture offers twice the precision as the Pen and Touch, at least in terms of how hard you press down the tip. Otherwise, position accuracy remains about the same as before, which is to say good, if not as crisp as the company's higher-priced Intuos and Cintiq lines.

If you've never used a drawing tablet before, be aware it takes some practice. When you bring the pen close to the surface, but don't actually press down, you'll see the cursor move on the screen. That lets you use the pen as a suspended mouse for selecting user interface elements on screen. It also lets you see where you are about to lay ink down. Once you begin pressing the pen tip down on the surface, it begins to draw on the screen. It's not like a mouse, in that it lays down the same length of ink no matter how fast or slow you move the pen. With a mouse, if you move it slowly, it will take more of your actual desk or table to bring the cursor from one side of the screen to the other. On the other hand, the pen's ability to control the cursor without touching the screen means that you need to expand the drawing surface window to cover the full desktop. Otherwise, you'll constantly select text or move icons around by accident.

Fortunately, the Capture still includes the same multi-touch as the Pen & Touch model. That means you can use the Capture as a genuine stand-in for a mouse or laptop trackpad, with its pinch zoom in and out, two-finger vertical scrolling for Web pages, select and drag (two taps plus a finger tip drag), and rotate (two wide fingers, twist). The four programmable buttons on the left work the same way as before: Navigate, left click, double-click, and right-click. I'd still prefer to see a pair of buttons along the bottom of the track pad; that would make the Capture an exact, giant replica of a laptop trackpad, with all the natural control that would entail.

Our favorite lower-cost drawing tablet remains the Wacom Intuos4 ($239 and up, 4 stars), which has still finer pressure sensitivity, an eraser, more programmable buttons, and a larger drawing surface. All told, the lack of an eraser is a big downside on both the Bamboo Capture and the $20 less expensive Bamboo Connect. It essentially removes the ability to work as a drawing tablet for many people, and you don't get a second programmable button on the pen that you can swap for the eraser function either. But the Bamboo Capture is a much better buy than the Connect, thanks to the Capture's excellent (if increasingly dated) software bundle, multi-touch capability, and four ExpressKeys. Here's hoping they bring back the eraser next time around.