Out of the Box

The box contents are, refreshingly, complete. The Kamvas 13 (Gen 3) arrives with everything you’d expect — and a few nice surprises: the display itself, a foldable ST300 stand, the PW600L pen, ten replacement nibs, a 3-in-1 cable. No accessory hunting required, except for a Thunderbolt capable US-C-toUSB-C. Build quality leaves a good impression. The casing feels sturdy, doesn’t creak, and at 865 grams it’s light enough to throw into a backpack. It feels more “tool” than “toy,” which is a good start.

The Kamwas 13 Display

Huion advertises the Kamvas 13 (Gen 3) as factory-calibrated to ΔE < 1.5 … our unit, however, came in at ΔE 2.5 (Adobe RGB, Measured with our Datacolor Spyder Pro). Not bad, but not “color-critical.” You’ll want to calibrate it yourself if you work on anything that depends on color accuracy, and big grading jobs or Onset-Livegrading are not recommended. Why we are saying that? For that price, you’d think you could just put it onto your DIT-Cart. You can, but you wil lhave to check the colors more often.

That said, the anti-glare surface deserves genuine praise. It’s the nicest we’ve seen so far: it kills reflections without dulling the image or killing contrast, and it feels wonderfully smooth, like a high-quality matte paper, not sandpaper. The screen itself is Full HD (1920 × 1080), which is perfectly fine for a 13-inch panel. It’s not a retina display, but at typical viewing distances it looks crisp enough for painting, layout work, or even quick note-taking.

Pen & Performance

The PW600L pen uses Huion’s PenTech 4.0 system, and it’s battery-free, a small victory in an age of rechargeable everything. During testing across Rebelle 8, Photoshop and Microsoft Ink, the pen behaved as expected: accurate tracking, no real lag, and pressure sensitivity that feels natural once you fine-tune it.

That “once” matters. Out of the box, the settings we made were too hard, and we initially thought the pressure curve was off. Turns out the issue was “idiot user”, not “hardware”. The Huion driver lets you adjust the curve quite precisely, well worth the five minutes of tinkering before judging it. After six weeks of daily sketching and note-taking, the original nib still showed no wear. The replacement nibs included should last a good long while unless you’re carving marble in Krita.

From the Left

As some of you know, one of our key ergonomics features is that we can actually use the device. And yes, I’m a Southpaw. A leftie. If you’ve ever wondered why some hardware never makes it into Digital Production, that’s the reason (Well, one of the reasons). If it’s not usable for us and the other 10% of humanity, it doesn’t get tested. Simple rule.

The Huion Kamvas 13 (Gen 3) passes this test with flying colors. In the driver software, flipping the orientation is literally one click, rotate, mirror, turn it upside down if you feel like it. There’s no directionality to the chassis and the ports, no fixed edge, angle or cable trap that dictates how you have to work. So if you’re one of us, this tablet won’t force you to contort your wrist or flip your brain to right-handed mode. And for the others: Did you recognize that the featured image above this article is a leftie drawing? No? I thought so.

Ergonomics & Workflow

The left edge holds two mechanical dials and five customizable buttons. They’re easy to reach and satisfyingly quiet. Macro assignment is limited, you can’t yet chain multiple actions (like “new layer + color switch”) but the basics are there.

Switching between monitors took a few days to get used to. In our dual-screen setup, toggling the pen focus from the Kamvas to the main monitor isn’t instant muscle memory. After a while, though, it becomes second nature. Mirroring the main display didn’t quite work in our configuration, but that’s likely a Windows quirk or a driver limitation. For most use cases, drawing, annotation, or light compositing, extending the desktop is the better option anyway.

As for Thunderbolt, a word of warning: not all cards are equal. We discovered that Thunderbolt expansion cards vary wildly between workstation manufacturers. Mixing an (Random example) Asus add-in card with a Lenovo board, for instance, another random example, is an exercise in frustration (see XKCD’s “Standards” comic). Not Huion’s fault, but worth noting if you’re planning a clean single-cable setup. Make sure your USB-C ports are Thunderbolt-capable!

Everyday Use

Once configured, the Kamvas 13 (Gen 3) simply behaves. It works as a secondary screen, a sketchpad, or a small presentation monitor. For productivity use, it’s perfectly fine: crisp enough for text, light enough for travel. The anti-glare glass remains a highlight: even after hours of drawing, the surface stays clean and non-sticky, with minimal fingerprint buildup. And because the tablet has no fan, it’s completely silent and stays cool.

One disclaimer, though: as with every tablet, it will not make you a good artist. You’ll still have to bring the talent yourself. If you’re wondering why we didn’t warn you earlier: we thought it was obvious, until we tried proving otherwise. For evidence, please refer to our attempt at a one-line house drawing. Don’t laugh — we’re mouse users by habit, idiots on top of that and it took eight failed tries to get that one semi-straight roof. There’s a reason this magazine focuses on tech, not concept art.

Verdict of the Kamwas 13

After a solid six weeks with the Kamvas 13 (Gen 3), we can confidently say this: it’s a sensible tablet. The display might not be colorist-grade, but it’s bright, balanced, and consistent. The pen feels natural, the build is solid, and the included accessories make it a ready-to-go package straight from the box. If you’re looking for a mobile, lightweight pen display that doesn’t break the bank, the Kamvas 13 (Gen 3) is easy to recommend.

Software quirks aside, it’s an ideal entry point for new artists, or a travel companion for experienced ones who don’t want to risk their main display in a backpack. We were genuinely surprised by how much performance you can get for €239 on Huion’s official store. And since our test went so well: should we ask Huion for one of their Android tablets next? Let us know, we’re curious ourselves.

The post Huion Kamvas 13 (Gen 3): Welcome to Sensible Pen Tablets first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Now that your I/O-Hardware should be up and running, let’s get into equipment for profiling the screen (aka calibration). Why do we need that? Well, until now, you were in a situation like making toast in your kitchen at home. You know that for your favourite brand of toast, you need a specific setting on your electric toaster to make it perfect. And what is the connection to colour grading? Well, if you visit friends and volunteer to care for toast, they may have another brand of toast and another toaster – two variables. Setting it to the same value as at home may easily burn your slice or leave it as pale as a ghost. “Profiling” your toaster with the right kind of bread may help…

Choosing an Instrument

Of course, you don’t use a thermometer to measure your screen’s colour, the typical instrument needed is called a colorimeter. A new one doesn’t come cheap, but if the screen you want to profile is not based on recent technologies like OLED or MiniLED, an older device bought second-hand or borrowed from a friend can be good enough. The popular brands for prices accessible to the average person have been Datacolor and X-Rite. The latter has by now re-branded their instruments for consumer level screen profiling to Calibrite.

The colorimeters by Datacolor are named “Spyder”, and the older ones were not really famous for their consistency among samples, as shown by our own experiences. And then, they used filters with organic colours until recently. Unfortunately, such filters degrade relatively fast over time. The better solution are dichroic filters, which last much longer, and are supposed to be used in the current Spyder X2 series. These are also supporting recent screen technologies, to which we’ll get back later. For further detail, see Jeremy Daalder’s Image Science.

The instruments by X-Rite came in two lines, the i1Studio/ColorMunki Photo, a spectrophotometer, and the i1Display colorimeters, and they have been using dichroic filters much longer. While spectrophotometers are generally more expensive and needed for printer calibration, they are not necessarily better for the purpose at hand. Their low-light sensitivity is less, so they can be slower for the darker patches. Since we are looking at you, cheapskates, we’ll focus on used X-Rite instruments, which can be found for decent prices.

This includes some re-branded ones, like the PhaserMeter from Xerox, which just looks like a ColorMunki Photo. What makes things a bit confusing: there’s also a ColorMunki Display, which looks like the i1 series and is actually a colorimeter. We have used one of each for this article, and both are a few years old. If you find one that suits your purse, you can even test it with a free software called i1Diagnostics. Something that can deteriorate in the ColorMunki are the reflectors to detect the position of the rotating part. It can be repaired by cleaning or replacement with aluminium foil if needed. As usual, you can find the advice for repair at iFixit.

Software and Installation

While you can freely download software for the X-Rite devices, which works even under recent operating systems and Apple Silicon, the devices themselves are the ‘dongle’ for this. So, the Xerox PhaserMeter, for example, will not work with the high-level i1Profiler, but is accepted by i1Studio. That’s a pretty easy to operate software with step-by-step instructions. But it’s not really the most precise kind of profiling, neither is it fast, and it will only generate ICC profiles.

What you really want for the use with DaVinci Resolve (DR for short) is a LUT for the monitoring path, which is not supported by i1Studio. Such a LUT can also be loaded into external devices, like LUT boxes, some monitors or TVs, and also madVR (for use as a player). There is an excellent open source software for this, called DisplayCal (based on Argyll). It had been a bit neglected by the original author Florian Höch – who can blame him, when so few donate? But thankfully, it has been resurrected as the “DisplayCAL Python 3 Project” by Erkan Özgür Yılmaz and Patrick Zwerschke.

We have used Version 3.9.14 under MacOS 15 Sequoia on Apple Silicon and it works fine for calibration, even if there are still some errors in the additional functions for analysis. It supports both instruments (and Spyders too). You’ll need to install Argyll (we used 3.3.0) and Python (here 3.13.2) too. Watch out: older versions of Python can crash DR. Scroll down to the installation instructions, the version for MacOS comes as a mountable DMG package you’ll only need to drag it into the applications folder. Apart from having Argyll and Python installed, you’ll also need to allow its use in MacOS with the command xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/DisplayCAL.app.

Once you got everything arranged, we are going to tell you how to profile your screen with DisplayCal, together with test results from a cheap, but surprisingly good monitor.

Update on September 18th, 2025

Please make sure that you use the latest version of DisplayCal, which is 3.9.17 as of this day. There was a bug in earlier ones where the black point correction was applied even if switched off, which would make your blacks muddy.

The post Colour Monitoring for Cheapskates! Part 2 first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Uli Plank.