Hello crew, it´s been a while since the old forum was shut down, but I´m glad to see you are still hanging around! I have a question regarding line jitter in Microsoft Surface devices, in particular SP 8, SP 9, Surface Laptop Studio 1st and 2nd gen.
We all know that Microsoft´s pen tech is not quite on par with Wacom EMR or Apple Pencil (or, I guess, Huion´s pen tech 4.0 for that matter), but I recently stumbled upon a number of reviews from PCWorld, which to my surprise featured also line jitter tests - kind of unusual, since most reviews focus on specs, display, camera etc, but do not delve into the subtleties of the respective pen technology. Here are the reviews: https://www.pcworld.com/article/538948/microsoft-surface-laptop-studio-review.html
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2084157/microsoft-surface-laptop-studio-2-review.html
https://www.pcworld.com/article/538941/microsoft-surface-pro-8-review.html
Now, it is understood that there is some residual line jitter in Microsoft Pen Protocol 2.5, but what caught my eye was the fact that there seem to be differences in the amount of line jitter between the different generations of Surface devices. In fact, PCWorld even mentioned this when testing the MS SP 9 and showed a sample, which had indeed noticeably more jitter than the SP 8 (a sample of which was also shown).
When I compared line jitter between the two generations of Laptop Studio, I was once again surprised to see the same.
See the attached file with all four line samples from the mentioned devices.
Here´s the question: Can anyone comment from own experience, or from other tests and reviews which show the same result? Is there a generational difference, or could this result be down to testing error? Or is there any other way this difference can be explained?
All replies are greatly appreciated!
Always nice to see a familiar name! Were all those line tests done over similar distance, and similar pen speed? Drawing the line slowly produces most jitter. And fwiw, on my SLS2 the worst case jitter (diagonal, slow) looks more like your SLS1 results, in OneNote at least.
Your SLS2 results look pretty bad, and with apparent digitizer damage in the green lines. I wonder if that could affect the panel response elsewhere.
Anyway, great tests, thanks for sharing!
@james!
To my knowledge, PCWorld made these tests with the same pen (Slim Pen 2). I cannot comment on the displays - it is possible that they are slightly different, and these differences might account for an increase in line jitter. I don´t know. Which pens produce less jitter than MS´s own Slim Pen 2?
So, there's differences in both the displays and the pens themselves. Just to add another monkey in your wrench here, you can get noticably less jitter with some 3rd party pens on all of the Surface Pros. They won't be perfect, but they'll still be less than MS's offering. I can't say for certain on those specific tests, but it could be differences in the pens as much as in the Surfaces themselves.
Screen protectors also contribute, and not just to MS. I have 2 iPad Pros and have noticed differences in jitter on diagonal lines based on what screen protector I'm using.