Sensu Brush Portable Artist Brush and Stylus

• Pros

  Elegant design. Responsive brush.

• Cons Not as precise as a pressure-sensitive stylus.
• Bottom Line

  The Sensu Brush combines a very capable capacitive touch screen stylus with an intuitive paintbrush that works on the very same touch screen.

By Will Greenwald

The iPad and other tablets have plenty of art apps that let talented hands draw on their capacitive touch screens. Sure, you could use a finger, but a stylus is a much better choice. Better still is a capacitive-touch-screen-compatible brush like the Sensu Brush ($39.99 direct). It's similar in concept to the Nomad Compose, as a stylus with an actual brush that works on screens, but it offers a much more attractive design and a more comfortable way to draw on your tablet's display.

The Sensu is simple and elegant, with a 3.6-inch-long cap/handle that conceals whichever of the two included capacitive tips you're not using. Closed, it's a 4.5-inch touch screen stylus with the standard black, rubberized, slightly spongy tip we've seen in many styli before. It's solid and just long enough to use like a pen, and alone, it's a suitable, if slightly overpriced, as a capacitive touch-screen stylus. If you pull it out of the cap and flip it around, though, the stylus completely transforms.

With the stylus hidden securely in the long cap, the Sensu grows to 7.2 inches and gains a slender, rubberized grip and a bristle paintbrush that works on your tablet's touch screen. The grip and the long cap lets the Sensu rest comfortably in your hand like an actual paintbrush, and the tip itself feels perpetually flexible, like it was a real paintbrush freshly dipped in water.

The paintbrush tip felt soft and responsive when I tested it on an iPad. I did some doodling in ArtRage, and while there was some slight lag in the drawings as I performed fast brushstrokes, the app followed my motions perfectly. Since it's a capacitive touch screen, the iPad's display (and other mobile devices' touch screens, with which the Sensu can also work) can only detect inputs as points, not as entire areas. So I couldn't "paint" in the same way I could with an actual brush; the point the touch screen detected was consistently in the center of the brush regardless of whether I was tapping the screen or pressing down to fan out the bristles. This is a limitation of the screen technology, and not a problem specific to the Sensu.

If you want a capacitive touch screen stylus specifically for art and don't want to deal with the extra price and hassle of a pressure-sensitive stylus, the Sensu Brush is one of the best styli you can find. It feels good, looks good, and easily switches between standard stylus and paintbrush. If you just want to tap and sketch, the $25 Pogo Sketch Pro is our top choice for non-professional stylus, and if you want greater responsiveness, an electronic, pressure-sensitive stylus like the Adonit Jot Touch is a better choice (but it's twice as expensive).

By Will Greenwald Analyst, Consumer Electronics

Will Greenwald has been covering consumer technology for more than six years, and has served on the editorial staffs of CNET.com, Sound & Vision, and Maximum PC. Since graduating from Syracuse University in 2005, Will has...

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