DIY Wacom Cintiq

DIY Cintiq

This is so SWEET! Bongofish has hacked an older Wacom Intuos 12" X 12" Pen Tablet and a 15" LCD screen, and constructed his own version of a Wacom Cintiq, a pressure sensitive pen tablet display.
These things are the holy grail for digital artists and graphic designers, Scott McLoud even sings their praises in Making Comics. Seriously, a Cintiq, a decent computer, and a copy of Manga Studio Pro, and you are really ready to rock the Comics world. Unforunately, they are priced accordingly, at $2500 they can feasibly cost more than the computer they're attached to. And for some reason Wacom seems to have a monoply on the things, though they've increased the size and features since the Cintiq was first released over 4 years ago, the price for a new one has remained the same. Not surprisingly, used ones suffer very little from depreciation, the oldest, smallest, most decrepit whilst still being functional one you might scare up on ebay is still gonna run you at least a grand.
Why Apple and Wacom don't get together and create an OS X tablet for artists, I'll never know. As things stand right now, you can get a really respectable tablet PC and some cool art software for what a new Cintiq will cost you. Granted your active surface will be smaller, and your levels of sensitivity will most likely be halved, but really... The crazy thing about this is that Wacom makes the digitizers for most tablet PCs.
Yes, this is a subject on which I've expended many hours of thought... I guess Bongo fish has as well. He has a 19 page chronicle of his adventure (which he insists is NOT a tutorial) and has a public forum available, for those who'd like to follow his ingenious example.

Now, let's see, if I built a nice wood case, I could come with a steampunk digital pochade box, using a Mac mini to power the thing... Hmmm...