Having not used anything else (Intuos won a product test hands down which made my mind up) I can't disagree, but it might depend on the kind of retouches you hope to achieve. I've mostly done old photo retouches where scanned dust is pretty unforgiving - I don't do much bold, freehand (arty) work but when I do, the quality is admittedly wasted. Oh well. I would say though that cost shouldn't always be the deciding factor - getting more pleasure (or income!) from your efforts is worth a little extra initial outlay in my opinion. SQR :)