The Huion Inspiroy Giano is the biggest screenless graphics tablets on the market today. It checks all the boxes for a pro-level digital artist and it was a pleasure to review. Though it might be a bit too big for the more nomadic types, for those with a fixed workstation, this tablet will give you the space to put your whole arm into those strokes of paint, along with a great pen experience.
Important notes: Huion reached out and offered to send the Insprioy Giano for me to test and review. The thoughts expressed below are, however, my own. It is also the first Huion device that I am testing, and so will compare this primarily with my experience of tablets from other brands and my general expectations from a device at the same price point.
This post also contains affiliate links. They do not impact on the pricing, but I might earn a small commission that goes a long way in dedicating more time to this website.
Overall…
+ Good Size
+ Great pen performance
+ Long battery life
– Can be a bit too big
– Only 6 express keys
Box contents
- Giano tablet
- USB-A to USB-C connector cable
- Drawing glove
- PW517 stylus
- pen holder
- 10 spare nibs
Giano specifications
You can find the full list of specs for the Inspiroy Giano G930L over on the Huion website, but here are some key ones to note:
| Device size: | 429 × 260.9 × 9mm |
| Active area: | 345.4 x 215.9mm (13.6 x 8.5inch) in PC mode |
| Wireless: | Bluetooth 5.0 |
| Battery life: | around 18hrs (4hrs to charge) |
| Express keys: | 6 (+2 on the pen) |
| OS compatibility: | Windows 7 or later, MacOS 10.12 or later, ChromeOS 88 or later, Linux Ubuntu 20.4, HarmonyOS 2.0 or later, Android 6.0 or later, and iOS/iPadOS* (Only with Ibis Paint X) |
About the Giano tablet
Right away, the Giano feels like a more premium device with solid build quality. It has a smooth matte surface texture, and a glossy plastic side panel housing the 6 express keys and an LCD screen.
Flipping it over, it has an aluminium alloy backing that adds to that premium and sturdy feel of the tablet. There are 4 round rubber feet in each corner to stop it from sliding around on your desk.
Then there is the size of this thing. It’s is going to take up a decent chunk of your desk. It’s big, but not at all bulky, and is actually a bit thinner than the pen it comes with. A tablet of this size is better suited to larger displays. So I’d recommend the Giano where you have a more permanent workstation that has more space and a large monitor.
Express keys
Surprisingly for its size, the Giano only has 6 shortcut keys here. Depending on how you work, that may not be enough for someone who likes using them. Many, however, prefer using their keyboards or a controller to the side anyway so it’s not that big of a deal.
Huion has it’s own controller that you can purchase separately, the Keydial Mini KD100, which will add a lot more convenience and customizability to your workflow.
For those that do like using the express keys, these are a good size and set in such a way that they are more or less at the same level as the rest of the tablet surface. So you’re not likely to accidentally press them. The centre four buttons also have a slightly raised circle or dash on them so that you can easily feel which button your finger is resting on.
Unfortunately, you cannot use two buttons simultaneously to activate a specific shortcut combination. I’m not sure if any tablet enables this though. I tested this in Photoshop setting the top button to Ctrl and the second button to T. Using my keyboard, this combination activates my Transform tool. On the tablet, it only recognises the first button being pressed.
You can, however, program combinations to a single button.
The LCD screen
The LCD screen on the Giano is an interesting addition that gives a tablet a likeness to the old Wacom Intuos 4. It’s nice to have a little something that lights up, but this screen doesn’t really add much to the tablet and drawing experience overall. It shows battery life, connection mode, if it’s reading the pen, when it’s in standby, and when you need to get up to take a stretch. For the most part this is info you can get from the driver application on screen where you will actually be looking most of the time. But why open up another window when you can just take a glance down at your tablet.
The pen
The included pen is the battery-free, EMR, PW517 which uses their PenTech 3.0. It delivers the now-standard 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity and 60degrees of tilt recognition, but the drawing experience is noticeably superior to some cheaper tablets with the same specs.
It’s light, and get slightly wider towards the front, and has a rubber grip. This makes it comfortable to use for long drawing sessions. There are also two buttons on the pen that are fully customizable.
There’s no eraser on the back of the pen, but that’s not a big deal: you can easily program one of the pen buttons to switch between the brush and eraser. I find that the eyedropper and right-click are my preferred functions for the pen though.
The donut-shaped pen holder lets you rest your pen horizontally or vertically. When you unscrew it, you’ll find a nib remover and a set of 10 spare pen nibs inside: 5 standard plastic ones and 5 felt ones. The felt nibs add a bit more resistance than the plastic ones to give a more pencil-on-paper feel. The first thing I did when unboxing this was to switch out to a felt nib.
Inspiroy Giano – $199.99 The Industry’s largest wireless pen tablet, perfect for creatives who need to do photo editing or digital painting on large 4K and 8K displays |
Huion Inspiroy Driver
The HuionTablet driver is pretty straightforward to use and is the first thing you’ll need before jumping into drawing with your new tablet. You download it directly from their website.
Once installed, you’ll be able to program each of tablet’s express keys and pen buttons to your liking, adjust the pen’s pressure curve, and map the tablet to your preferred monitor.
You can create individual profiles for each of the applications you use as well. That’s pretty standard these days though across different tablet brands, but still worth pointing out.
I currently have a two-monitor setup on my desk, one of which is a pen display from another tablet brand, and I have multiple tablet drivers installed on my Windows 10 machine. I didn’t notice any crashes or conflicts when I plugged in the Huion Giano for this review or during any of my painting sessions with it.
One thing I would be curious to see built-in with the driver is an on-screen radial menu similar to what you might find with Wacom or Procreate’s quick menu. This could be another way to compensate for the fewer express keys without someone needing an additional controller.
Reviewing the Giano in action
Pen test
The pen sensitivity was perfect out of the box. It’s accurate, sensitive, and I felt very in-control for the full range of pressure going both from light-to-heavy and heavy-to-light lines.
The lines were smooth without any need for stabilizing in Clip Studio Paint. I also used it without issue in Photoshop, Magma, and briefly in Krita. The pressure response was great across all of them.
The only time I’d notice any lag is when my system was overloaded with tasks and I was trying to paint online and stream at the same time with a sketchy internet connection. But overall, the responsiveness of the tablet and pen was excellent.
Connectivity
You can use the Giano either through a wired connection, or wireless with Bluetooth 5.0. Today with so many peripherals, it’s great that you can go wireless with this, sparing you more cables on the desk and another occupied USB port. I didn’t notice any difference in performance between wired and wireless connections.
Battery life is said to be 18 hours. and takes around 4 hrs to fully charge. I didn’t specifically test this during the review, but considering how much time I spent using the Huion Inspiroy Giano wirelessly, I’d say those durations seem accurate. The tablet will go to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity to preserve battery life and you can adjust this in the tablet settings.
When you battery is low, you can plug it in and continue drawing while it charges.
Size on the desk
The tablet is big and you’re going to want to consider your desk space before purchasing it. Placing the tablet in front of laptop keyboard makes for slightly awkward use. When the express keys on the side aren’t enough, you’ll be reaching pretty far to use your keyboard shortcuts.
A two-monitor setup, with the monitor and tablet in front of me and laptop to the side, makes it easier to access shortcuts if not using a separate keyboard.
Generally you’re going to want to pair a tablet this big with a fairly large monitor (20″+). When using a smaller monitor for example, it takes larger movements of your arm to get corresponding movement of the cursor on your screen.
Painting
For this review of the Huion Inspiroy Giano, I decided to spend some time doing some quick animal eye and landscape studies. I’ve also used it during my online classes doing still life painting in Magma for their weekly Classroom live streams.
The Giano gives a very pleasant drawing experience. I get similar feel as with drawing on the Intuos Pro, or the old Intuos 4 L which had more or less the same size active area.
Again, the size of the Giano is a noticeable thing. With a bigger active area, your arm is making bigger movements. As a painter, I like having the space to do that. I would prefer a larger monitor to pair this with though. Currently, I’m using a 15.6″ laptop which is almost 1-to-1 with the Giano’s active area.
After active use painting for two hours, the tablet sends you a little “Time to get up and stretch notification” on-screen and with an animated walking figure on the tablet’s LCD display. I actually really like this small but thoughtful feature. For myself, the reminder is welcome, but you can turn it off in the settings if you want to.
The Huion Inspiroy Giano with mobile devices?
Graphics tablets with mobile devices are a bit of an unusual use-case, certainly for this tablet and the market that would be looking at the Giano. But seeing as the feature is there, we’ll take a quick look at it. For phones, you’ll need to switch the tablet to phone mode which will limit the working area to something closer to a standard phone dimension format. There is no driver installation required.
Android and phone mode
Many drawing tablets that are Android-compatible connect through a wired connection. The Inspiroy Giano however can pair with your Android phone or mobile tablet through Bluetooth.
When connecting the Giano to a phone, you’ll need to switch the tablet to phone mode by pressing the first and fourth key simultaneously. An image of a phone appears on the tablet’s LCD screen to let you know it has successfully switched.
Inspiroy Giano – $199.99 The Industry’s largest wireless pen tablet, perfect for creatives who need to do photo editing or digital painting on large 4K and 8K displays |
Inspiroy Giano + iPad?!
The tablet is also compatible with iOS/iPadOS. Or rather, you can pair with the tablet using Ibis Paint X specifically. The rest of the OS won’t respond to the tablet input. Of course, pairing the Huion Giano with the iPad Pro is completely unnecessary but it was interesting to test it out for this review.
Once you pair the devices the same way you would with any other Bluetooth device on iPhone or iPad, you open up Ibis Paint, go to the settings, and switch the pen input to Huion taablet.
In general, this is not a tablet you’re likely to purchase for the express use of painting on a mobile device. I’d recommend something a bit cheaper and more compact for drawing on your phone.
Conclusion?
After this review, I have no problems recommending the Huion Inspiroy Giano. Overall, this tablet delivers as a pro-level device that’s well suited for digital painter with a larger monitor setup. The Giano is priced at around $200 USD. Considering the size and drawing experience, this is good value for the more intermediate-advanced digital artist. I’d recommend something different for beginners looking to buy their first tablet.
If you prefer to have a dial on the tablet, rather than the LCD screen, to add more functionality, check out their Inspiroy Dial 2.
So should you buy the Huion Inspiroy Giano?
Yes if… you have a large monitor and are a more experienced digital artist.
No if… you’re a beginner or desk space is very limited.
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