It’s crucial to check whether or not a particular combination of device and stylus supports the features you want or need, though. Broadly speaking, however, these are the benefits (and drawbacks) of using an active stylus. MicrosoftĪlthough, as we noted above, there are numerous combinations of active stylus types and tech, which leads to different feature sets. In a plain old device with no fancy stylus compatibility, the digitizer is limited to simply turning the analog actions of your finger tap and swiping into digital signals for the device to process.Ĭommon Active Stylus Features Finally, the red pen can live in the digital age. The touch screen on your computer and phone has a special layer called a digitizer. With active styluses, however, there are complex technologies at play that rely not just on the design of the stylus but also on the screen design, too. With a passive stylus, if you tap it on the screen and something happens, boom, that’s it. If passive styluses are like the analog headphones of the stylus world, then active styluses are like wireless headphones-where the wireless standard (and the generation thereof) matters. Let’s look at some of the big concepts before looking at the individual technologies. Shopping for an active stylus and using it successfully with the particular product you have is far more complicated than shopping for a passive stylus.

And if you just want to play around, it sure beats buying a whole new device and an expensive active stylus.Īctive Styluses: Pricier But Feature Rich Active styluses mean no more hover-handing while you draw. While they’re not particularly well suited for serious creative work, even with finer tips, capacitive styluses are great for any situations where you want finer and more precise control over screen input than your finger allows for. No extra functionality: Because the stylus is just a finger substitute, there are no fancy bonus features like erasers, brush switching by a button click, or anything like that.No palm rejection routine: If you touch your other fingers or palm to the screen while using the stylus, the screen will interpret your palm touch as a finger tap, either switching the contact point or activating multi-touch features.Zero pressure sensitivity: The stylus is just a replacement for your finger and is a binary input-either you’re touching the screen, or you’re not touching the screen.Cheap: Because the design is so elementary, basic ones are a few bucks, and even fancy ones with interchangeable tips are under $15.No charging: A plastic or metal stick with a conductive foam tip doesn’t require batteries.Your device just thinks it’s a very skinny finger, so that means zero pairing or fussing. No pairing: It’s a stick with no electronic components.Works with any modern touchscreen device: iPad 1? Galaxy Note 20? Doesn’t matter if it has a capacitive screen, a capacitive stylus will work.Except instead of interacting with the screen by pressure through a hard point, capacitive styluses interact with the screen via a bit of rubber or conductive foam that emulates the electroconductivity of your fingertip.Ĭapacitive styluses have some compelling positives for general use but some steep downsides for specialized applications. LDprod/Ĭapacitive styluses are, like resistive styluses, a form of passive stylus. Capacitive Styluses Squishy foam or rubber tips are a giveaway on a capacitive stylus.

Hej stylus with regular mouse