What is a digitizer? This is what I call it. It is more commonly known as a Pen Tablet. My hand-mouse skill suck as far as drawing goes. I have always wanted the ability to draw my own graphics, but trying to draw them with a mouse is damn near impossible. So I hunted around and came up with a Wacom Graphire. I am sure there are better ones out there, but for the little bits I do this will work like a charm. Basically this thing is a tablet looking doo hickey with a wireless mouse and a wireless pen. You hover the pen over the tablet and then press down to draw. The other end of it works as an eraser.
The want for one of these started when I was doing landscape design. I thought it would be great to have a design that was “hand drawn” but didn?t require me to have reams and reams of drawing vellum. I am still smothering under the weight of all of that paper. I did move to computerized drawings with a CADD based program a few years ago. That shaved about 3 days off of drawing production. I still like hand drawn designs better.
So there you have it. No. Digitizer is not what they are technically called. But it is still cool.