After seeing some amazing photoshop skills from various people on forums etc, I thought why not give it a go. It seemed most (if not all) of them use a graphics tablet of some sort.

After a bit of looking around I found the Genius G-Pen for £60 incl postage. I wasn't too sure about ordering it, so held off. Then this morning I found out a certain shop was selling re-badged ones for £30.

Specification

On opening the box, I found a amazingly stylish and ultra thin graphics tablet.

I downloaded the Genius G-Pen F610 windows driver software from the internet to find it was exactly the same as the software on the Medion driver cd.

The software bundle included is quite good for the price. Aswell as getting the driver CD which has some helpfull programs you get Corel Ulead Photoimpact 12 SE.
The pen also comes with 2 refill nibs & a battery.

The first program I tested the tablet in was Adobe Photoshop CS3. Doing sketches was pretty easy and the sensitivity was quite good. As it's my first graphics tablet, I guess I cannot compare it to anything.
I then moved on to testing it on AutoCAD 2008 MEP, which was a bit hit and miss but was quite easy for tracing old drawings (I am currently re-drawing some from the 1980's). The only problem seems to be scaling.

The macro buttons can be handy aswell. They can be programmed for various tasks from the software included.

The only things which are a let down when comparing it to Wacom tablets (£200+) are the size of the pen, the fact the pen uses a battery and the sensitivity.

For someone who is like myself wanting to learn graphics tablets, I would say it is perfect. For £30 you can't really go wrong.

Mac OS X

It doesn't say anything about Mac OS X support on any of the medion userguide or box (not surprising). But it does work as it is the same as the Genius G-Pen.

You do need to download the drivers from the Genius site tho as by default it only seems to half work in that you can't use brushes properly in photoshop as the brush is on or off rather than being sensitive to how hard/soft you press on the pen.

The Genius installer is very easy to follow. It requires a restart, but it all works after that. You even get software (Pen Pad) for controlling the settings of the tablet which look identical to the windows driver software.