At first glance, the Huion Kamvas Studio 16 looks like a great portable tablet for sketching and note-taking, combining Huion’s drawing slate expertise with a Surface Pro-esque portable computer. Sadly, the buggy Windows 11 Ink experience, mediocre performance, heavy weight, and lack of keyboard cover mean it’s none of those things.
Huion Kamvas Studio 16
Mediocre hardware and a buggy Windows 11 pen input mean this potential Surface Pro alternative is a frustrating mess. Once you get to the drawing features, it’s pretty good, but everything else doesn’t make sense. It’s too heavy and lacks a keyboard cover, so it’s difficult to carry around. And if you wanted this for home use only, you’d be better off with a drawing tablet you could connect to your more powerful home PC—and upgrade as needed.For those wanting to only sketch or take notes on the go, an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil is just the better choice.
Hardware: Looks Good, Feels Good, but Lacks Ports
Machined nearly entirely from a single piece of aluminum alloy, it’s a stunningly good-looking piece of hardware. It weighs a 3.75lbs, or nearly 1.7kg. Around the rear is a single pull-out stand that runs the width of the tablet (exactly like the Surface Pro, in fact). It’s stiff, and maintains almost any upright angle you set it at.
Measuring 384 x 234 x 12mm, if you lay the tablet flat, the straight, sharp-edged sides make it hard to pick up again; there is no tapering on the underside, so nowhere to grab. Not that you’ll want to use this handheld for any length of time.
A separate desk stand is included for more comfortable, flatter drawing angles. The tablet rests on this with the help of rubber grips; there’s no other connection mechanism or way to lock it on.
The top side of Kamvas Studio is mostly a fan grill, with a power button and LED to the right side. The power button, which doubles as a fingerprint sensor, has an ever so slightly loose feeling to it, in a way that cheap smartphones do, and Apple devices don’t. It wobbles a bit, and protrudes a little too much for my liking. It’s such a minor point, but can sometimes indicate poor manufacturing tolerances, and especially annoying when you have to interact with this button so often.
You’ll find stereo speaker grills on the bottom of the left and right sides; there’s also a volume rocker and 3.5mm stereo headphone port on the right side. The dual 2W speakers are functional for interface sounds but horrendous for watching any media content; they sound like it’s just gone for a quick dive.
Other connectivity comes in the form of two USB-C ports on the left. One is reserved for power input (which draws around 42W when charging), leaving you with a single port for accessories—so a hub or dock is going to be needed for most people. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth round out the scant connection options.
There is nowhere for the passive “PenTech 3+” stylus to stay attached or slot into the Kamvas; it lives inside a separate tube, which also stores the spare nibs.
The stylus is comfortable enough—a little thicker than a pencil, but lacking any special grip. It’s single-ended, and a rocker button provides a right click and other assignable functions.
Huion claims the battery should be good for about 6 hours, which is very optimistic. Sure, if you run in the lowest brightness and don’t do much, you might achieve that. But on full brightness (which you’ll need to do), running anything intensive, expect more like 3-4 hours.
Screen: Not Brilliant, but Not Bad
At 15.8 inches and 16:9 ratio, the screen isn’t quite big enough to encompass an entire A4 page, nor is it the same ratio; it runs at a native 2560 x 1440p. There’s a chunky 3/4 inch of black bezels all around it, and an anti-glare matte coating that’s always appreciated on a drawing tablet—but also tends to make elements a little less sharp.
Huion claims a maximum brightness of 400 nits, which I’m unable to verify—but while it was enough to be somewhat visible on an overcast British day, in full sun, it wouldn’t be useable.
Setup: It’s Windows 11, So Expect Frustration
The Kamvas Studio 16 runs Windows 11, and you’ll need to sign in with a Microsoft Account; you can’t bypass this.
Once that’s set up, you’ll also be given the option of signing in using the fingerprint sensor that’s built into the power button in the top right. Unfortunately, it didn’t like my finger, so what followed was a silly performance of being told to move my finger to the right, then being told it was “having trouble recognizing you. Please…” (I couldn’t read the rest of the text, because the message didn’t fit within the dialog box and was cut off). So I skipped that, and spent the rest of the day wondering what exactly was wrong with my finger.
You’ll then be walked through a dozen privacy options asking if they can track everything you do; feel free to say no. Then you’re able to decline a free trial of Microsoft 365, an extra 100GB cloud storage upgrade, and Xbox Game Pass (that’s three separate screens of advertising for different subscription services, I’ll note).
I admit, this is the first Windows 11 device I’ve had the misfortune to be subjected to, but I can’t remember the last time setting up a new device took this long, and required me to decline so many things.
Sadly, the problems didn’t stop there. The next time I booted the machine up, most things failed to load. Illustrator wouldn’t open. Creative Cloud remained a white window. Neither Chrome nor Edge would bring up any window. A restart fixed it, but that’s not a great first impression, and set the scene appropriately for everything that followed.
Specifications and Performance: Mediocre, Forget Gaming
The Kamvas Studio 16 should be quite a beast internally, given it’s designed to handle powerful creative applications like Abode Illustrator. Featuring an 11th-gen 2.8GHz Core i7 CPU, and 16GB of RAM, you’ll also find a 512GB SSD, allowing you to store plenty of apps and drawings, as well as little space left over for some (very light) gaming.
The reality, however, is that it’s far from a beast and suffers from interface lagging; the CPU is about two generations old. I frequently found myself clicking on something multiple times—cursing the unreliable pen input—only to have multiple instances of something open ten seconds later.
Relying solely on an Intel Iris XE graphics with no dedicated GPU, 3DMark performance was as bad as can be expected, barely managing 4-6FPS in the TimeSpy demo and scoring a mere1,061 for graphicsand2,766 CPU; overall1169. NightRaid is specifically designed to test integrated graphics; it scored10,446there. FireStrike scored3,215. The key takehome here is: don’t buy this for its graphical prowess.
With an overall score of4,429, consisting of9,729essentials,6,099productivity, and3,974digital content creation, it’s clear the tablet is no slouch for general tasks, but it’s also only slightly better than the two-year-old Surface Pro 9.
Despite not the primary use case, I wanted to see how it would fare for gaming. I wasn’t going to stress it too much with the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, so I tried LEGO Fortnite, and GTA V—neither particularly demanding games for current-generation hardware.
LEGO Fortnite ran smoothly enough—after turning down the texture details even further from the default low settings. It wasn’t brilliant, but it was playable (with occasional freeze-ups). That was in an empty area however; I shudder to think how it would perform once your town was actually built up.
GTA V was stuck at 30fps, and again, playable, once the settings were lowered. It wasn’t a horrendous experience, but abandon all hope of playing anything heavier or more graphically demanding.
I’ll note that the area around the power plug got uncomfortably hot while plugged in and doing only basic tasks like downloading some large games. Generally though, the fans were inaudible most of the time. I suspect there’s some throttling to keep it running cool without needing to rely on the fans often.
Windows 11 and Pen Input
As a pen input device with no keyboard, all text entry is done using an onscreen keyboard. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always reliable in my testing. Actually, that would be putting it nicely; it was utterly inconsistent and frequently infuriating.
Out of the box, the pressure sensitivity seemed wrong; I was unable to draw thin lines on the default settings, and had to use the Huion app to swap over to “hard” setting.
I’ll also note the lack of palm rejection if you don’t use the included glove. That’s not unusual; it’s a consequence of using a passive pen input. Unlike an Apple Pencil, which requires power to actively transmit a unique signal to the screen, the Huion pen can only behave like a very fine human fingertip.
Another annoying aspect of the included pen was that I found it was too thin. In isolation, it wouldn’t be an issue, but the presence of buttons on the shaft meant I was accidentally pressing them far more often than I’d like to. Thicker pens with grips (or dual-ended pens) don’t have that issue.
Other frustrations lie solely within the Windows interface. An ink input panel is supposed to appear when you tap on a text input field. But it didn’t, at least not in a browser or other apps. I had to manually load the on-screen keyboard app instead, which was annoyingly laggy; this is different to the tablet-mode keyboard, which is also supposed to appear if you don’t enable handwriting input—but unsurprisingly, that didn’t work either.
Curiously, the Windows Ink pen input panel does appear if you double-tap on some dialogs, like the search bar of the start menu. If this worked everywhere, it would be fantastic. Handwriting recognition has improved so much in the last decade that even my horrendous squiggles are legible by advanced AI. But even myAcer C100 running Windows XP Tablet Editionfrom two decades ago was more reliable with a stylus input than this.
As a initial test, I tried writing in the included Journal app. Pressure sensitivity didn’t work, but to rule out the app not supporting it, I opened the Huion setting app and tried toggling the Windows Ink option since it was the only thing that seemed relevant. Now the journal refused any input at all. Attempting to click back on the Huion app just left the screen flashing briefly. I restarted. Again.
Sometimes the screen would just refuse to rotate when held upright.
Generally though, as a drawing slate, once you set the pressure sensitivity to a more reasonable level, the Kamvas 16 Pro is fantastic. Smooth lines, and accurate nib following without lag. Just be sure to wear that glove, or you’ll be dealing with random dots everywhere.
It’s hard to pin down these inconsistencies and bugginess to Windows 11, the Huion drivers, or the Intel Irix XE drivers; more likely, it’s some combination of all of them. And it’s worth noting that nearly all of these frustrations could be fixed if there was a trackpad and keyboard cover you could attach to the tablet. But there isn’t, and you shouldn’t have to add Bluetooth accessories just to make a device useable.
Should You Buy the Kamvas Studio 16?
While the Kamvas Studio 16 gives the impression that it could be a serious alternative to the Microsoft Surface, the lack of a keyboard cover means it’s not. It’s also disappointing that no case is included in the box, meaning you’ll need several third-party accessories to make this portable.
The Kamvas Studio 16 feels like it’s having an identity crisis. The large size, heavy weight, and lack of an attachable keyboard indicate it doesn’t want to be carried around as a note-taking device but rather, stay sat on your desktop permanently. But if you’re not taking this out and about with you, there’s no excuse to put up with mediocre tablet hardware.
It’s clear that some combination of the Huion drivers and Windows 11 is causing buggy behavior; precisely where the blame lies is not clear. Whether this can ever be fixed is debatable; most pen inputs I find equally as frustrating for general UI use, even on Mac OS. The difference is that you don’t normally use a pen as the primary input method. The Kamvas Studio 16 and Windows Ink invites you to use the pen for everything, then disappoints.
If you’re set on a portable Windows device for sketching and taking notes, an officialSurface Pro tabletis going to give you a much better pen input experience, with full support that’s baked into the OS—and a neat keyboard cover so you’re able to still tap way when needed. And if you dont need portability, there areplenty of optionsfor a plain drawing surface to provide input for your existing desktop. But personally, if I were an aspiring artist who wanted the best quality of drawing input on the go, I’d go for aniPad Proand Apple Pencil. There’s no comparison.
