Should you buy a Surface Pen for the Surface Pro 6?
Best answer: Yes! But only if you think you’ll be doing a lot of note-taking, digital art, or sketching. If you’re planning to do occasional annotations or document signing, it might be cheaper to simply use a phone stylus or even your finger.
Great for heavy duty inking
Ultimately, whether you should grab a Surface Pen or not depends on whether or not you think you’ll be using it. As a product, the Surface Pen is a great companion designed to perfectly complement the Pro 6.
The Surface Pro 6 has a co-processor built to reduce latency between the pen and the screen, producing a nearly-imperceptible amount of lag. The Surface Pen supports tilt shading and 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, which is great for digital art and heavy-duty note-taking alike.
The Surface Pen supports leading art programs like Clip Studio, Photoshop, Sketchable, and dozens more, with a reverse digital “rubber” for erasing, and additional configurable buttons for added functionality. If you’re planning to use your Surface Pro 6 as a travel buddy for note-taking at university, a simple click of the eraser button can launch OneNote for fast-access to your digital notepad. It even has a magnetic strip down the side for storing against the edge of your Pro 6 (also compatible with the Surface Go, Surface Book 2, and Surface Studio 2).
If you’re not a heavy note taker or a digital artist, the Surface Pen is a little harder to justify. At $100, if you’re only planning to use the Surface Pro 6 screen for annotating documents occasionally, highlighting, or signing documents, you can probably just purchase a simple non-digital rubber-tip cell phone stylus (like the Amazon Basics model), or just use your finger to achieve the same results. If you can spare the cash though, adding a Surface Pen to your tool kit can add a personal touch to signatures and other quick notes.
Our pick
Surface Pen
Digital ink, designed for Surface
With 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity, tilt support, magnetic storage, and the Pro 6 latency-reducing co-processor, the Surface Pen is the best digital inking option for all modern Surface devices.
Light inking alternative
Amazon Basics Stylus
For the casual inking fan.
If you don’t think you’ll be doing a huge amount of inking, picking up an analog stylus like theAmazon Basics rubber-tipped pen will serve you well for light annotations and document signing.
