Gadgetory

Apple has always been the king of computers for the creative class but Microsoft is making a serious play for artists animators illustrators and more with its growing surface line now angered by the flagship surface studio and its inventive dial controller the surface studio combines a bunch of ideas we've seen before but puts them together in a new context it's a 28 inch all-in-one touchscreen Windows PC with a display that folds all the way down to a very low angle of 20 degrees the hinge mechanism is very smooth and you end up with something that looks like an artist's drafting table the benefit 4k screen has an insane 4500 by 3000 pixel resolution and it works with the same surface pen that comes with a surface book and the surface pro but it's the new optional surface dial that really makes the surface studio feel different it's a wireless Bluetooth control wheel made of aluminum on the larger screen of the studio you can actually mount the dial on the display for additional options such as visually scrolling through a color wheel or selecting brush sizes the combination of surface dial and surface studio is very cool but right now it's also limited to a small group of supported apps like sketching bowl and art program it also works as Spotify which is kind of cool but Photoshop and other key art programs will have to wait for support we've set some actual artists loose with the surface studio and it's pen and dial and while they were impressed they liked the big bright screen and the stylus pen more than the dial itself which still feels like a work in progress I find this thing a little clunky just the menu system is really ornate there's so many options to this that I kind of am unintentionally selecting things that I didn't mean to select like that I just selected right back to the main menu I'm sure after a couple weeks of working in it I'd get the hang of it this is nice to have all this space I guess this feels more like a smaller drafting table in itself which is cool for an artist it's never good to work flat completely you always want to have it at an angle so it's cool that this is able to do that one night's bonus for the $3,000 and up surface studio it includes a high-end laptop gaming graphics card from Nvidia so not only can it handle high-res animation and video editing you can play games on the awesome-looking giant screen too