HP Envy x360 Convertible Laptop and HP Tilt Pen Stylus

My daughter wanted a laptop for her birthday so I thought why not get her one that could convert into tablet mode and could also accept active pen input, this way she could practice her digital drawing skills as well. After much research, I decided upon the HP Envy x360 as it seemed to offer a good power to cost ratio and there are a few artist reviews that seem happy with it. Here are the specs:


HP ENVY x360 15-cn0000na Convertible Laptop,
Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM,
256GB SSD,
15.6", Full HD,
Dark Ash Silver, with HP Tilt Pen Stylus
Purchased from John Lewis £999.99

The HP Envy opens just like a regular laptop does. The tilt stylus pen came with the laptop but it does not attach to the computer in any way.

With a 15.6" screen this laptop is fairly large and quite heavy. That's not normally a problem with most laptops but for a convertible, it can weigh quite heavy as you try to hold it in tablet mode. My daughter preferred drawing on it by propping it into the tent position.

The Envy in tent-position

Envy folded over and engaged into tablet mode

This machine is excellent for doing windows laptoppy things like browsing the internet, watching Netflix, writing Word documents playing games etc. But for drawing on, it really isn't much good. There are several main reasons why:



The first thing that is glaringly noticeable is the screen itself. Although fine for viewing movies and the internet, once you open up a blank canvas to draw on, you can see the banding that occurs when you change viewing angle. When you move the laptop around, the screen exhibits dark and light bands. It's very annoying and does not happen with my iPad Pro nor my Cintiq. On the video above perhaps you can see what I mean. The photos I post in this review also show the banding.

The other annoying thing about drawing on the Envy is that the stylus just doesn't really draw that well. When you have used the Apple Pencil on the iPad Pro you take for granted how smoothly it draws. Now that I have tried an active pen on a windows machine, I realise just how far apart these two drawing devices are. The HP pen is thin and not pleasant to hold and whatever program I use to draw with (I used Sketchable, Leonardo, Autodesk Sketchbook and MediBang Paint Pro) the lines were quite jittery when drawing slowly and there was always a bit of lag. The cursor also sort of hunts around a bit when you hover the pen tip over the screen just prior to making contact. It means it isn't always very accurate. It was just very frustrating trying to get a decent flow going when sketching away. Unlike the iPad Pro where you can just pick up the thing and draw without any problems.

The glossy screen also meant the pen glided across too smoothly - but then again that's also the case with the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil (hence why I bought a matt screen protector). All the drawing programs did respond to pressure sensitivity so I'll give it that. Palm rejection was so so. Most times if you are careful it ignores your palm but every so often it will suddenly recognise touching and draws crazy zig zag lines by itself. I really tried to get stuck into a complex piece of artwork but I soon gave up and just finished it off using my Cintiq.

But that's just my experience. Other artists have reviewed very similar models to our HP Envy. The video below for example is the HP Spectre - a slightly higher spec version to our one. The artist loves it so maybe our machine is a bad choice for artists or maybe she just prefers using it instead of an iPad Pro, or maybe I'm a crappy digital artist...



The video below shows an artist using the HP Pavilion which is a model below the one we have. He doesn't seem to have any problems drawing and painting with it.




Conclusion
For a £1000 laptop, it does the job as a laptop perfectly well enough. My daughter loves it for the games, movie watching, school homework research and other PC stuff. But for drawing, she hates it and always bugs me to use my iPad Pro. With hindsight I should have just bought her the iPad. But with all the main PC functions it can perform, at least the Envy is not going to waste. I'm no Apple fanboy, but honestly, if you are at all serious about getting into digital art, buy an iPad Pro or a Wacom.

UPDATE Jan 2021
My daughter still uses this laptop - but solely for her home school work. She has long ago lost the stylus pen but she never used it from digital art anyway. She doesn't even use it in tablet mode. She does however use my old iPad Pro to draw on. So with hindsight, in buying this laptop I probably overspent on functions that were of no use (touchscreen, stylus pen) and perhaps should have spent that money on a machine with better spec processor, memory or storage.







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