Wacom Updates Bamboo Mac Tablet Line with Bamboo Touch, Bamboo Pen, & Bamboo Pen and Touch [5 New Consumer Tablets, Brings With It Integrated Multi-Touch Functionality]

For those of you that are really into the whole graphic design thing, you’ve probably been working with digital pens and tablets for years now. Where tablet and pen technology is still a relative newcomer is within the home and general consumer market. Most computer users are more comfortable using a mouse for their digital photo manipulation and until very recently digital tablets have been out of reach of the average consumer price-wise. Not only that, but you were pretty much stuck having to use a stylus as your input device rather than your own digits. All that’s about to change with the latest product updates from the tablet-makers at Wacom. Their new Bamboo consumer tablets have been updated with five new products that now include multi-touch technology.

Wacom has just announced that they are expanding their Mac-targeted Bamboo line of consumer tablets with the addition of five new products all of which now sport multi-touch, finger-based input. The five new Bamboo products include a touch-only, pen-only, and three versions of the pen and multi-touch combo. The new Bamboo family consists of three core products: Bamboo Touch, Bamboo Pen, and Bamboo Pen and Touch. Two additional tablets, the Bamboo Craft and Bamboo Fun round out the new additions. The new multi-touch gestures include zoom, scroll, pan, rotate, and forwards/backwards, and all but the Pen-only model will feature ExpressKeys.

The Bamboo Touch is the most basic model and is marketed to those users that just want an additional input device or want to replace their mouse completely. The Bamboo Pen is a pen-only pressure-sensitive device with two programmable side buttons that ships with Corel Painter Essentials 4.0. The combo pack Bamboo Pen and Touch combines the benefits of both the multi-touch pad interface and pressure sensitive pen input device. The Bamboo Pen and Touch ships with Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 and Color Efex Pro 3.0.

Bamboo Craft, which comes with both the pen and tablet, is for the crafty home user that might just happen to be into scrapbooking and the like. It comes with a ton of goodies including Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter Essentials, Color Efex Pro, as well as 26 digital scrapbooking lessons from designer Jane Conner-Ziser (Now who wouldn’t want that?), and a free scrapbooking album from Shutterfly. The Bamboo Fun ups the ante with a larger tablet and also comes with Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Painter Essentials, and Color Efex Pro.

All Bamboo tablets plug into your Mac via the attached USB cable and are compatible with Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6. The Bamboo Touch ($69), Bamboo Pen ($69), Bamboo Pen and Touch ($99), Bamboo Craft ($129) and Bamboo Fun ($199) are available for sale now wherever Mac peripherals are sold. For more info and to purchase your own Bamboo tablet you can visit www.wacom.com.