Raising the Bar of Portable Pen Displays: We Review the Wacom Movink 13-Inch OLED Pen Display Review

by Nicco Valenzuela March 21, 2025 0 Comments

It’s about time that pen tablets and pen displays caught up with the portability of the computers we use for editing. The Wacom Movink allows you to bring the convenience and precision of pen displays anywhere your work takes you.

Editing with a pen display, for as long as most photographers remember, always meant being stuck at a desk at home or in the studio. While pen tablets have gotten light and portable, most pen displays, especially those with decent screens and color performance, remained large and bulky. However, this new portable pen display from Wacom brings all the features of a capable editing tool in an entirely different form.

The Wacom Movink OLED Pen Display

The Wacom Movink is a surprisingly thin and light slate that comes in at just 319.5 x 205.2 mm (12.6 x 8.1 inches) with a width of just 4 mm (0.16 in) and weighs just 420 grams (0.9 lb). Within that slate is an active area of 294 x 165 mm (11.6 x 6.5 inches) that contains a 13.3-inch OLED panel behind anti-glare glass with an anti-fingerprint coating.

It comes with two physical buttons located on each side, accompanied by a touch button on the side of the active surface and a USB-C port on each side that can be used interchangeably for the pen display’s operation. The bottom surface is lined by thin rubber grips, but other than that, there are no other physical features or buttons on the tablet.

Display

The 13.3-inch OLED screen has a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels (FHD) with a maximum brightness of 350 nits and a contrast ratio of 100,000:1. It displays 10-bit color and covers 100% of DCI-P3 and 95% of Adobe RGB. The Wacom Movink is also Pantone and Skintone validated with a color accuracy rating of Delta E <1.5; however, the package did not come with a factory calibration report that gives information on the actual performance of the specific unit.

Pen

The included pen of the Wacom Movink is a battery-free EMR-type pen that conveniently holds three extra tips inside the barrel of the pen, which can be opened the same way you would open a refillable ink pen. The package does not include a pen stand, and the pen also has no way to be kept on the tablet itself. The pen has 8,192 pressure sensitivity levels, a resolution of 5,080 lines per inch, and provides input even when tilted up to 60 degrees on any side.

What’s in The Box

The tablet, the pen, and the cable. That’s it.

The Wacom Movink’s packaging might be the most impressively underwhelming box of a pen display. It comes in a box made of eco-friendly material with absolutely no plastic involved. Inside is the pen display, the pen, and a single 1 m USB-C to USB-C cable. The Movink does not include a stand, nor does it have any flip-out extension legs for versatile working angles.

Setting Up

Basic setup for the Movink pen display is as easy as plugging one end of the cable into your preferred side and the other end into a computer’s USB-C port that is capable of driving both the tablet inputs and the display output. Once plugged in, the screen will display the computer’s default settings, which can either be a mirror of a primary display (when used on a laptop) or an extension. If the touch function is activated, it also already works with the display without the need for any driver setup.

To maximize the capabilities and the ergonomics of the display, setting up requires the downloadable driver, which gives access to an expansive set of custom functions and on-screen shortcuts. Setting up the pen involves selecting custom shortcuts for each of the three buttons on the lower third. They can be assigned to keyboard shortcuts for use with different apps, keyboard modifiers that can be useful for navigation and selection, or other gestures or even system shortcuts.

When setting up the pen display itself, various on-screen shortcuts and radial menus can be assigned and set up for quick switching between modes and editing tools. In addition, since the screen is sensitive to up to 10 points of touch, various gestures can be assigned to different finger combinations and movements for better workflow efficiency.

Application and User Experience

The very first impression that most users would probably have about the Wacom Movink would be its size and weight. Having used pen displays of different kinds and sizes, it was surprising to see that this OLED pen display is even thinner and lighter than some (non-touch) portable monitors on the market and nowhere near the size of any other pen display around. However, it is important to know that the ideal size for a pen display would be entirely dependent on the user’s workflow and preference. I personally like the 13-16 inch range because using them doesn’t involve too much surface area to work with, but other users definitely would prefer larger sizes, especially in digital illustration. In relation to that size, the 1920 x 1080 maximum resolution makes sense; however, it would be interesting to see if a 2.5K resolution would make a huge difference. Regardless, it was still quite a surprise that it is thinner than any other 13-inch pen display I have used.

One of the most impactful features of this new pen display is the kind of panel that it uses. Most other pen displays have an IPS panel, while the Wacom Movink has an OLED panel. Generally, an OLED screen would mean more vibrant colors, greater contrast ratio, and even brighter output that does not sacrifice color accuracy. However, a seemingly minor yet crucial benefit of using an OLED screen is that it has a more flexible viewing angle range. Unlike IPS panels on pen displays that require a more perpendicular angle between the viewer and the screen, the OLED display can be viewed consistently even from acute angles. This might be the reason why the Wacom Movink does not have a built-in or even a separate adjustable stand; however, it would have still been nice if either of them were an option.

The next concern would be workflow efficiency when using the pen display. Initially, it seemed that one would have to be dependent on the computer’s keyboard to switch between tools and functions because of the lack of buttons and dials, but when properly set up, the on-screen menus and shortcuts seamlessly fill the void. In combination with the touch sensitivity of the screen, one can use one hand for pen inputs and the other hand for navigation gestures. At the same time, the user can either set up one of the pen’s buttons to pull up a shortcut or radial menu or set up a gesture instead to do the same. It is also a thoughtful feature that the touch sensitivity can easily be turned off. While that feature is very handy and makes using the pen display much more efficient, some users find it more comfortable to rest their palm on the screen without worrying about unintended inputs.

Overall, whether used as a portable editing tool that one can bring everywhere or as a semi-permanent tool on an editing desk that doesn’t take up too much space, the Wacom Movink is certainly an impressive new development and worthy of being the first of its kind. It would, of course, be nice to see more options in terms of size and resolution when it comes to OLED pen displays down the line, but this first iteration, in my opinion, has successfully raised the bar.