I’ve been playing around with an iPad for the last week or so, and the one I’m using has a stylus, and I checked out a few styluses on Amazon for it, but they all have a soft rubber tip the size of a pencil eraser (just like the one I have).
Do sharper/pointier styluses exist that would enable me to draw with more precision for note-taking, ideally down to the one-pixel level? I mean, it’s not too big a deal, but occasionally I have to join up a single-pixel-wide line or circle or something, and this huge stylus tip isn’t very precise. I’m a lot better at doing it on my resistive touchscreens.
Capacitive touchscreens typically do not have anywhere close to the same resolution as resistive touchscreens. Given the screen resolution of the iPad, I seriously doubt you could get anywhere near single-pixel level.
Hmmm, that’s interesting (and unfortunate). On a 9.7" 1024x768 display like the iPad, what kind of resolution does the touchscreen digitizer have? What about on something like the 3.6" 800x480 display my Touch Pro 2 has, with its resistive touchscreen?
I do not know the specifics of those touchscreens but I would expect the resolution of capacitive sensors to depend heavily on specific software processing. Sensing cap touches is not a very exact science, and it’s possible that the same touchscreens can be tuned to work much better with a specific fine stylus if finger recognition is not necessary at the same time. Most of these have only 15 to 30 sensor channels, so getting high resolution requires getting a very precise measurement at each one.
Resistive touchscreens are frequently limited in resolution by whatever ADC is used to read them – getting 12-bits of useful values in each dimension is not unknown, and I would expect useful resolutions from 500x500 to about 4000x4000 on most consumer resistive touchscreens.
Looking at the current rush of ‘pad’ computers coming on the market this year, more than a few seem to support a stylus. Stylus technology is well established - Wacom tablets spring to mind, but those are not display screens.
Is there any reason to be concerned that stylus use will degrade the transparency of the touchscreen?
Tablets that support pen and touch on the same screen have been around forever. That’s what a “tablet PC” is, and oftentimes they’re “Wacom Penabled”. The iPad just chose not to use that technology.
The iPod stylus I purchased for a dollar or two had a wide flat surface. I tried using the edge of the surface to no avail. Seems like whatever touches the screen it has to be 1/4" or so wide to work.
I too am after a finer stylus that anything I can find online.
My bro pointed out to me that if you place the -ve end of a regular AA battery on the touchscreen you can use it as a stylus. Obviously this is a very big tip, so I’m planning on soldering a bit of wire on the end of the battery to pass the -ve charge down and hopefully this will work.
One article I saw said that Steve Jobs did not like styluses and deliberately designed the iPad/Pod to use a finger. No lost stylus… Maybe he’s just getting even with the people who made fun of the Newton.
If you are going to use a wire, be sure it is smooth - the glass may be scratch-resistant, but there’s a limit to the miracles of modern science, even from Apple.