Been looking at the Intuos Pro Medium and wanted to check it’s the right one for me. I illustrate in Adobe Illustrator but have always used a mouse (a lot of tracing scanned drawings etc) but fancy something with a bit more flexibility and – hopefully – to speed things up a bit.

Any advice greatly appreciated…

Great bits of kit, been using an Intuos A4 tablet for an age. My main advice would be not to go too large – mine takes up a fair bit of space on the desk and TBH a lot of the time I have it set to use an A5ish area rather than the full tablet. Once taught some clients who’d spanked a load of money on a3 tabs and they were unwieldy and unnecessary for their usage.

great for freehand photoshop work not sure you win much in Illustrator though (I don’t use Illustrator btw but All the bezier shape work I do in photoshop is with the mouse & keyboard).

Do it. I bought one for Photoshop and cannot believe how much quicker and accurate it is! I think it took me half an hour to get used to it and be better than a mouse.

EDIT:
I have the small one and its just the right size, a friend has the A4 and cannot get used to it due to the big movements needed.

Right, so the small is better than the medium? Does anyone use them for bezier work? Is there any advantage to mouse-click/toggling-keys?

Another vote for the smaller size …

Can’t comment on the intuos, but I got the (larger) bamboo pen and touch to use with my laptop for product design sketching. I haven’t used a smaller one, but I’m pretty happy with the size of it. Works well. I soon found I wanted something where I could draw directly onto the screen though… so started looking at Cintiqs.

Instead of getting a Cintiq I got a samsung SLATE 7 tablet pc (it uses a wacom digitizer in the screen) used on ebay for about £300. So if you really want a cintiq but don’t want to spend 1k, have a look at these. And now it means I have a full Windows 8 tablet PC that I can carry around too.
It doesn’t support as much pressure sensitivity as a full cintiq, but there is still plenty- Photoshop doesn’t even support what the cintiqs are capable of.

You might not be interested in any of that, but thought I’d suggest it in case!

Have a Bamboo that I use occasionally. The fluidity on decent Windows apps is okay (even pretty good at times) but on a Mac it’s on a completely differently level.