Microsoft to buy N-trig for $200M

A Wacom acquisition did cross my mind as well but that would have been significantly more expensive and complicated. N-trig is Israeli making it more friendly to an American takeover and facing less anti-trust scrutiny than the Japanese Wacom that is partly owned by Samsung with a 10% stake I believe. Plus Microsoft already had a 6.18% stake in N-trig.
 
$200 million is a bargain compared to Wacom and with any Israeli tech it's always top notch. Having used both NTrig has better consistent out-of-box edge accuracy. With Wacom the cursor on the screen relative to pen position tends to drift a little towards the center of the screen as you get closer to the edge. Fortunately, Windows built-in calibration corrects this.
 
N-trig's technology has vastly improved since the first N-trig devices I used from 8 years ago. There's some that say that Wacom's pressure sensitivity is better and Wacom does boast 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity in their newest electrostatic pen tech versus only 256 levels for N-trig. However many say that it hardly makes a difference. I'm not an artist so I really don't have the expertise to make an informed judgment.

It will be interesting to see what Microsoft does with this. They did put a lot of thought into the Surface Pro 3 pen and I'd imagine they'll improve the pen for the Surface Pro 4 and beyond.
 
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