Wacom Movink 13 Hands-On Review: A Professional-level Pen Display With A Few Quirks

by Terry Sullivan

posted Friday, April 11, 2025 at 1:15 AM EDT

The Wacom Movink 13 pen display tablet is lightweight, portable, and easy to set up and use, but it might be a bit pricey for some creators’ budgets.

Wacom Movink 13: Pros

Very responsive
Portable, very thin, and lightweight
Excellent quality OLED screen
Easy to set up and use
Touchscreen capabilities
Includes free third-party software discounts and offers

Wacom Movink 13: Cons

A bit pricey
Lacks wireless or Bluetooth connectivity
Need to pay extra to use with older computers that lack USB-C ports
Need to pay more for basic accessories that should come with the pen display

The thin, lightweight Wacom Movink 13 is very handy for traveling creators who need to edit images, graphics, video, and animation on the go.

Wacom Movink 13: Technical Specifications

Brand: Wacom
Display Type Technology: OLED
Display Size: 13.3 inches
Native Resolution: Full HD or 1920 x 1080 pixels (@50/60Hz)
Active Area: 11.6 x 6.5 inches (or 294 x 165 mm)
Aspect Ratio: 16:9

Wacom Movink 13: Bottom Line

The Wacom Movink 13 pen display tablet is lightweight, portable, and easy to set up and use. It might be an invaluable computer accessory for most photographers and content creators. However, you’ll want a newer computer with USB-C ports for best results.

Although the Wacom Movink 13 is ultrathin for a pen display, it still has room to include a physical button and a USB-C port on each side of the tablet.

When Wacom introduced the Movink 13, it described it as the company’s “first OLED pen display designed and developed to meet the needs of creative professionals, digital artists, and design students." According to its press release, it combined “a professional pen experience with full HD OLED technology for a super slim display.” As an experienced photographer and a long-time user of various Wacom tablets, the word that jumped out was “experience.” Why? I’ve been using Wacom tablets on and off for decades, and the experience has been mixed.

For example, one pricey Wacom display tablet I used about 20 years ago had a significant lag. When I moved the stylus across the screen to create a brushstroke, there was a delay before the cursor on the tablet display moved. It was not a good experience at all.

Overall, I had an excellent experience using this ultra-thin display tablet, which supports Windows, macOS, Android, and Chromebook devices. There’s no hint of the lag that plagued these devices so long ago. When tackling various tasks, whether removing dust spots from a photo, creating a digital painting, or producing a short animation, the Wacom Movink proved up to the task.

(See “How I Tested This Pen Display Tablet” below).

How thin is thin? The Wacom One pen display (right) is roughly twice as thick as the Wacom Movink 13 (left and center).

Wacom Movink 13: Design and Performance - A Very Thin But Powerful Pen Display

The Movink's super-thin, minimalist, rectangular design tapers ever so slightly from top to bottom, and I find it beautiful. Its thickness might give the impression that it’s not very sturdy or powerful, but it is both.

It’s constructed with tough Corning Gorilla glass, has an anti-glare surface, and has an anti-fingerprint coating. For extra toughness, it also has a durable magnesium alloy body. The tablet is based around Samsung’s OLED technology, which has Full HD resolution, 10-bit color, and a contrast ratio of 100,000:1. Users can configure the Wacom Movink for 100 percent DCI-P3 and 95 percent Adobe RGB coverage with a Delta E difference of 2 or less, validated by Pantone.

In simple terms, this means the Movink 13 has an incredibly sharp and vibrant display. It shows a full range of rich, accurate colors, ideal for artists, designers, and anyone who needs their work to look right on screen. Thanks to the OLED technology, blacks look truly black, not gray, and the contrast makes everything pop. The colors are so accurate that they meet professional standards used in the film and print industries—and they’ve even been officially certified by Pantone for color precision.

If you own a newer laptop or desktop, which will most likely have USB-C ports supporting video output, you’ll need just one USB-C cable to connect the Movink to your computer. That’s right—no extra power cable. However, there is also an option to connect an additional USB-C cable for the AC adapter and AC plug (sold separately) to power the Movink when using computers that don’t have enough power to run both devices.

Before you use Movink 13, you’ll need to download drivers for your computer, whether for Mac, PC, or certain Chromebooks (running the latest version of ChromeOS). It will also work with select Android devices, like the Samsung S24 (Note: The pen can be used with Android devices, but according to Wacom, the touch function is unavailable as of April 2024.) The required Wacom Center utility can customize the tablet and stylus use, which I’ll discuss below. You can also access user help, updates, and product information in the Wacom Center.

There’s a USB-C port on each side of the Wacom Movink 13 pen display.

At the start of this review, I noted that for best results, you should own a newer computer with USB-C ports. But what if you’re working with an older laptop or desktop?

Suppose you don’t have these types of ports on your computer. In that case, you’ll not only need to spend more to buy the pricey Wacom Converter, $79.95, but you’ll also need to purchase several additional accessories, depending on your system, which could include an HDMI cable (HDMI 2.0 later), a USB-C to C or USB-C to A for the pen signal, and possibly an AC adapter (24 Watts minimum and a cable with a USB-C plug on one end) to power the Wacom tablet. That means you might have to pay at least $100 or more unless you have those items already.

My guess is that most creators will be working on newer computers with USB-C so that it won’t be as much of a dealbreaker for most of the intended users.

This photo shows the Wacom Pen Pro 3 against a white background.

The Wacom Movink 13 comes with Wacom’s Pen Pro 3.

Wacom Movink 13: A Versatile Stylus – The Wacom Pro Pen 3

The Wacom Pro Pen 3 was introduced in 2022, alongside the Wacom Cintiq Pro 27, and is an excellent tool for Movink, although the Wacom One Standard Pen (CP92303B2Z) and Wacom One Pen (CP91300B2Z) are also compatible with the Movink 13.

Wacom says the Movink 13 is the first display tablet with third-party pen support. So, you have the option to use non-Wacom pens, including, among others, the Staedtler Noris Digital, Staedtler Noris Digital Jumbo, Lamy safari twin pen EMR black, Lamy AL-star black EMR digital writing pen, Dr. Grip Digital for Wacom (Aqua Blue) (CP202A01A), and Dr. Grip Digital for Wacom (Black) (CP202A02A).

I didn’t find the new Wacom stylus to be much different from the previous ones I’ve used, although I did like that it was thinner and had three instead of two physical customizable buttons.

In addition to being cordless and battery-free, the Wacom Pro Pen 3 provides 8192 levels of pressure sensitivity. If you want to sketch fine-art lines like those of Peter Paul Rubens, which go from barely visible to the deepest, darkest tone, you have more than 8,000 “pressure” levels.

The Pro Pen 3 supports a 60-degree tilt, mimicking pencil shading in digital painting apps. Its two sections are interchangeable, allowing users to access three replacement nibs by unscrewing them.

I would have liked to have received a pen holder in the package, which would have prevented me from losing the pen.

Editor’s Note: This is the first thing I noticed when preparing the Movink 13 for review. The protective bag (which, by the way, you need to purchase separately for $44.95) doesn't even have a space to house the pen, and I’m surprised I didn’t lose it before sending it out to be reviewed.

This image, which comes from the Wacom Center software app, depicts the Wacom Movink 13, photographed against a white background, is an annotated photo that indicates where the virtual screen keys and the physical buttons are.

The Wacom Center includes help guides, like this annotated photograph, which helps you locate the virtual screen keys on the edge of the pen display and the physical buttons on the side of it.

Wacom Movink 13: Customizing Your Workflow

Various tools on the Wacom Movink 13 and Pro Pen 3 let you customize your setup and workflow.

The pen display tablet features a physical button on each side adjacent to each USB-C port. Two virtual Touch Key buttons are also on the display surface, approximately where the physical buttons are located. Additionally, there are three customizable physical buttons on the pen itself. All seven of these buttons can be configured through the Wacom Center app.

I found setting up these buttons, called ExpressKeys and Radio Menus, relatively intuitive, but perhaps that’s because they were on previous tablets I used. I think beginners will need to spend some time figuring out how to use them to suit their workflow.

Also, some users may desire extra physical shortcut keys built into the device to press for repeated actions, like increasing or decreasing the brush size. But considering how thin the device is, it’s nice to have any physical controls at all.

This image, which comes from the Wacom Center software app, depicts Wacom's Pen Pro 3, photographed against a white background, and the options you have to assign various functions to the pen's three buttons.

The Wacom Center lets you set the functions for the three buttons on the Wacom Pro Pen 3.

Wacom Movink 13.3: A Pen Display Tablet with Few Flaws

There are only a few flaws with the Movink 13. For example, as I mentioned earlier, you’ll need to pay extra to purchase a Wacom Converter to use it with older computers that lack USB-C ports. (Your computer will need to have an HDMI port, though.)

You can only connect to your computer using a wired connection rather than connecting via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. This is necessary because the Movink 13 isn’t just a drawing tablet; it’s also a display. Bluetooth and WiFi might be fast enough to track the movement of the stylus, but neither are robust enough connections to power a display.

Another minor flaw for some is that although the Wacom Movink 13 has two physical buttons, it doesn’t have as many as some other display tablets, like the XPPen Artist 12 Pro Pen Display, which has eight physical shortcut buttons. Of course, how many shortcut buttons you need can be a matter of preference. However, it’s more convenient to have shortcut buttons.

Using the Wacom Foldable Stand for Movink accessory provides a better experience using the pen display, and like a stylus holder, I wish that were standard on this $750 tablet.

This composite image show the same black-and-white, sepia-toned image of a woman, before and after dust spots and other blemishes were removed using Adobe Photoshop.

In this test, I removed dust spots and blemishes and improved the color and tone of the original photo of my grandmother.

This composite image shows the same color photo of the author, before and after applying various filter effects using the BorisFX Optics app plugin within Adobe Photoshop.

For this test, I used the Boris FX Optics plugin inside Adobe Photoshop to add various effects to my passport-like selfie.

Wacom Movink 13: How I Tested This Pen Display Tablet

A valuable aspect of using a pen display tablet with your computer is its ability to dramatically enhance your digital photograph editing and multimedia production and overall productivity. Photographers will appreciate display tablets because they allow for quick photo editing in the field or studio while enabling the creation of drawings, illustrations, and animations. Additionally, they are excellent for handwriting notes and swiftly converting those notes into text, all of which I tested.

I used Adobe Photoshop to restore an old sepia-toned portrait of my grandmother and removed dust, spots, pen marks, and blemishes from the photo. I also used Photoshop and BorisFX Optics to add some fun effects to a self-portrait.

I also tested how well it handled other types of image-making: I used Corel Painter 2023 to replicate the appearance of a painting of a still life.

With Adobe Premiere Rush, I put together a very short video clip with a title, filters, transition effects, and audio clips. I also used Propellerhead’s Reason 12 to see how it handled audio files. Using Adobe After Effects, I produced a short animation video of an animated self-portrait drawing traced from a selfie using the animation app’s paint tools. Finally, I used the note-taking app Notability to quickly handwrite some notes and see how well they converted into text.

This image is a still life, which includes a blue glass, house plant, metal lock, and other items on a beige tabletop against a gray background, digitally painted in a traditional style with Corel Painter 2023.

I used the Movink 13 for this test to produce an oil painting-like still-life illustration in Corel Painter 2023.

This screen shows how I used the Wacom Movink 13 and Pro Pen 3, to draw in various values and create various audio effects in one of the panels of Reason 12 software, a digital audio workstation app.

I tested Movink 13’s Pro Pen 3 to see how well it worked in Reason 12 software, a digital audio workstation (DAW), which is used for music creation, podcasts, and other audio-related projects.

Wacom Movink 13: Price and Availability

Wacom pen display tablets range from $250 for the Wacom One 12 display tablet (11.6 inches) to more than $3,000 for the Wacom Cintiq Pro 27 Creative pen display.

The Wacom Movink 13, the pen display tablet tested in this review, costs $749.95 and includes the tablet, the Wacom Pro Pen 3 (with nib holder and replacement nibs), a USB-C cable, and a Quick Start Guide. It’s available on the Wacom website, Amazon, B&H, and other major online retailers.

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