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Which is the best Samsung tablet for sketching?

Kamal Kaur
Which is the best Samsung tablet for sketching?

If you love to sketch your drawings or paint something, or simply sketch an illustration then tablets are the best. Be it Apple iPad or Samsung tablet with sharp OLED screen you need a tablet. For Samsung users which is the best Samsung tablet for sketching, then what we recommend is Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite. This tablet comes with a sleek S Pen great for sketching.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite Specifications

Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite Specifications
  • The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite has an LCD screen rather than a more contrasty OLED.
  • Dimensions: 244.5 x 154.3 x 7mm
  • Aluminium back, glass front
  • Weighs: 467g

Its back and sides are smooth aluminium, without the chunk of plastic seen in the cheaper Galaxy Tab A 10.1. The Lite’s display surrounds are much smaller than those of a 10.2-inch iPad. Also, at 7mm thick, the Lite is thin at 5.7mm. The corners of the display border are curved. It gives the front a soft, friendly look and the border thickness is near-identical on all four sides. 

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite has good speakers too. These are stamped with the Samsung-owned AKG brand, and there are two drivers. They sit on the top and bottom – well, they do with tablet held portrait – designed to give you a stereo sound field when you sit down to watch a movie.

Screen

The screen here is a 10.4-inch 2000 x 1200 LCD panel, one that’s less sharp and contrasty than the last middle-pick Samsung tablet. The lower resolution is fairly clear from the outset, and it makes text appear softer than on a higher-end tablet. Not that it looks bad, you’d need to have the two side by side really.

The Lite does have one important benefit over the iPad 10.2. Samsung uses a laminated screen, where layers of the screen are fused together. It makes the screen image appear closer to the surface, so more vital looking. The colour saturation is good too.

Note that the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite is not water-resistant. There’s no fingerprint scanner either, but the Lite does support face recognition for password-free secure unlocking.

S Pen Stylus – Good for Sketching

Samsung-S6-Lite

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite S-Pen stylus Features a Non-powered S-Pen stylus with 4,096 pressure sensitivity levels and Magnetised securing mechanism

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite seems a lot like the older Tab S5e until you look at the included S-Pen.

This is a classic-style graphics tablet stylus, one that can only interact with the tablet when the tip is a centimetre or so from the screen. At this range you can press the button on the barrel to take notes, doodle on the screen or capture parts of the display as an image.

You can use the Tab S6 Lite’s S-Pen to navigate the interface, to handwrite instead of type, and good for drawing. The tablet does not come with any pre-installed art apps, but it doesn’t need them when excellent apps like Infinite Painter and ArtFlow are there on Google Play Store.

The drawing experience in these is excellent. Samsung’s new S-Pen stylus feels natural – press harder and the line drawn by your virtual pencil or brush becomes thicker or darker – there’s palm rejection support so you can rest your palm on the screen, as you might on the sketchpad, and pressure sensitivity is just as advanced as the pricier Tab S6’s stylus. 

Writing and drawing are also better than with the original Tab S6’s S-Pen. Samsung claims latency has been reduced but the shape is also superior. You can see the nib more easily as you draw, and the shape and texture of the barrel are great.

There’s no slot in the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite to store the pen, though, but it does cling onto the side of the tablet with the help of a magnet. Samsung also sells a Book Cover case, which has a slot in its spine for the S-Pen. This case can also prop up the screen, in classic folio style.

Move the S-Pen back and forth quickly over the screen and you’ll see a slight lag as the drawn line catches up. But even Apple has only eliminated this in the iPad Pro, and it is slight enough not to impact the feel of drawing in almost all cases.

Software and performance

  • Samsung Exynos 9611 processor, 4GB RAM (DDR4X)
  • Google Android 10 operating system
  • Samsung One UI 2.1 interface

A lack of colour controls is a pretty minor difference between this tablet and the more expensive option. DeX is a more major one. Because the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite doesn’t have it.

DeX is part of Samsung’s software that makes Android look and feel more like a laptop interface. It’s important if you want to use a Samsung tablet as a laptop replacer. And the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite is not really designed for this job. Not only is DeX missing, there’s no official keyboard accessory either.

DeX aside, the software looks and feels just as it does on other Samsung tablets and phones. You have your homescreens and a paginated app drawer, plus Samsung Daily – the last a bonus home screen that offers a news feed and “cards” of other info from services like TikTok and Spotify.

Google’s Android 10 is the software under the Samsung user interface layer, which runs perfectly well.

It has Exynos 9611, a Samsung chip roughly comparable with one of the more popular mid-range Qualcomm processors. This is paired with 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. That may not seem all that generous when lots of phones have 128GB space, but it’s far less likely to get clogged up with photos in a tablet.

Samsung has a history of scraping by with the just enough power, which becomes obvious when you try to play one of Android’s top-end games. Sure enough, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite’s graphics chipset is not as punchy as the iPad 10.2’s A10 Fusion CPU/GPU.

Battery life

  • 7,040mAh battery capacity
  • USB-C charging
  • 13hrs playback

Battery life is excellent too. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite has a large battery capacity – just like the non-Lite Tab S6.

Samsung says the battery should last 13 hours, which seems perfectly plausible if you play a video stored on the tablet itself, rather than streaming, and lower the brightness a bit. Still, that’s probably not how most will actually play video on this tablet.

Camera

  • 8-megapixel, f/1/.9 aperture on rear camera
  • 5MP, f/2.2 on front camera
  • 1080p 30fps video
  • The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite has two cameras. One on the front, another on the back.

Its rear camera has an 8-megapixel sensor and f/1.9 aperture lens. Samsung used the same sensor in the ultra-wide camera of the Galaxy A90 5G.

The Tab S6 Lite can take pleasant enough shots in daylight when there’s not too much light variance in the scene. Try to shoot an image with a bright clouded sky and darker foreground and the tablet falls over. While the clouds may look well exposed, the foreground is left a near-silhouette.

The front camera is perhaps more important. It has a lower-end 5-megapixel sensor. Again, your phone selfie camera may well be a lot better, but the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite will beat an awful lot of laptop webcams for video chat. 

Samsung clearly didn’t put too much for the Tab S6 Lite’s budget into the cameras, as the hardware is the same as the cheaper Galaxy Tab A 10.1’s. The Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e has better cameras, which may be worth considering if you do not care about the S-Pen stylus.

Other advantages

The cost of Samsung Galaxy S6 Lite

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite is one of the best somewhat-affordable tablets for getting creative. An iPad is still far better for music, though. Garageband is included with iPads which isn’t available on Android anyway; there are Android alternatives, like FL Studio Mobile, but nothing on Google Play has quite the same mix of ease of use.

The Tab S6 Lite is already certified for Netflix HD streaming too, although it does not support HDR (high dynamic range). Try to stream an HDR YouTube video and you’ll only see the standard dynamic range (SDR) version.

There are also limited display controls. You can’t alter the vibrancy of the display colour, most likely because this isn’t a wide colour gamut screen like the non-Lite Galaxy Tab S6.

Thus  Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite is an obvious choice if you love sketching, This Samsung tablet comes with a very good Apple Pencil alternative, the S-Pen, and is an all-round quality bit of kit that hits a real Android tablet sweet-spot.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite is now available for purchase in the US. The cost ranges between $349.99 to $500.

The Wi-Fi-only variants of the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite in both 64GB and 128GB storage configurations where the 64GB variant is priced at $349.99 while the 128GB variant costs $429.99 stateside.

Also at the time of writing this tab was offered by retailers in three color flavors, unlike in European countries where it comes in only two colors. You can choose between Angora Blue, Oxford Gray, and Chiffon Rose colors for the 64GB variant.