I wanted to get a graphics tablet for someone who is having an issue with their hands (RSI style thing) and uses Photoshop and vector based drawing programs (e.g. Inkscape) a lot.

Unfortunately, I cannot afford anything that expensive and I am not sure how much it would get used, so was looking at some relatively cheap ones. ￡50 sort of thing. However the ones in that band seemed fairly small. A Wacom one only had an active area of 15cm x 9cm. I wondered how useful small graphics tablets were? (I have never even used a Graphics Tablet). I don't want to get something that was useless.

I would also assume with a tablet it is totally possible not to use the mouse? Like you could switch tools on photoshop using the pen?

I use a Wacom Bamboo Pen tablet. It was relatively cheap. Especially compared to the Bamboo Fun ($200 US). It was a fairly small drawing area, but it covers the entire screen. And, yes, you can use the tablet instead of the mouse. The pen does everything. It does take a lot of getting used to, though.

Ok. Thanks for the advice.

Does anyone have any reccomendations? I was looking for something around the ￡50 - ￡80 mark. The main one I was considering was the http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wacom-Bamboo-Pen-Graphics-Tablet/dp/B002Q4U4AE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299797574&sr=8-1 (Which Expresate has and I assume was fine with it) so if nothing else comes up I will probably go with that.


#EDIT#
I just noticed that the area of the tablet doesn't match the screen resolution. Is that an issue?

The top right corner of my tablet's drawing area correlates with the top right area of my screen. The bottom right corner of the drawing area correlates with the bottom right corner of my screen. And so on.