Wacom has introduced the Inkling, a digital sketch pen that captures a digital likeness of your work while you sketch with its ballpoint tip on any sketchbook or standard piece of paper.

Designed for rough concepting and creative brainstorming, Inkling bridges the gap between paper sketching and digital drawing by giving users at the front end of the creative process a way to rough-out ideas with real ink on paper and capture their concepts digitally so that they can be later refined on their computer, according to Don Varga, director of Professional Products at Wacom.

Inkling even allows users to create layers in the digital file while sketching on paper in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro.
Spontaneous and Liberating. The digital sketch pen is comprised of both hardware and software components.

Hardware includes both the pen and a wireless receiver that captures a likeness of the sketch and stores it digitally. The ballpoint pen uses Wacom’s pressure sensing technology (1024 levels of sensitivity) to detect how hard the pen is being pressed to the paper while sketching. These pressure variations will appear in the digital version of your drawing.

The receiver can be clipped to the edge of standard paper or sketchbooks and the position can be adjusted for left or right handed users to provide the receiver with an uninterrupted line of sight with the pen tip. When sketching is complete, the receiver is connected to the user’s computer via USB to transfer the digital files. Files can be opened with the included Inkling Sketch Manager software to edit, delete or add layers as well as to change formats and transfer the files for adjustment and editing in creative software applications.

The Inkling (US$199) will be available online at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com) and the Wacom Store (http://www.wacom.com/store) beginning in the latter half of September.