Well, to clear up a little terminology, what you’re looking at is a drawing tablet. A “lightpad,” or light table / light box, is something more like this. Basically, a drawing surface with a lightbulb in it, used for tracing. Extremely useful, but not to be confused with a drawing tablet.
As far as drawing tablets go, Wacom is easily “the name brand,” and they’re very popular with digital artists. Personally, I use a Wacom Intuos3, which is an older model, and I’ve always been happy with it. There’s a learning curve to drawing on a screen, instead of under your hand, so she’ll have to adjust to that (and I’m still not as good drawing as I am with a pencil,) but it’s great stuff once you adjust. That one you’re looking at is a smidge larger than mine, and it should be plenty big for her unless she’s a professional illustrator…although I’d expect her to have one already, if that were the case. It’s a good tablet, is what I’m saying.
There are three separate Intuos lines:
Intuos Pen (basic tablet)
Intuos Pen & Touch (multi-touch controls; you can pinch/flick to scroll/zoom/rotate)
Intuos Pro (touch controls plus a bunch of hardware buttons)
The one you linked is a Pen & Touch, and while it doesn’t have the hardware buttons my old Intuos3 has, the touch controls sound a lot more useful anyway. If your budget is $200, I don’t think you’ll do better than the one you’ve picked out; it’s a very good tablet. If you wanted to save money, you could get the Small version, or drop the touch controls, but I think it’s a comfortable size she won’t get frustrated with, and the touch controls sound super useful.
If I had to guess, I’d imagine the artists at Anet probably use the Pro tablets (naturally,) or tablets from the Cintiq line, which incorporate a screen that you draw on, instead of looking in one place and drawing in another. They’re very expensive, however (starting at $1000,) so they’re absolutely not a place to start. I wouldn’t recommend starting with the Pro ones, either; it’s just overkill.
I hope that helps! If your sister-in-law is getting into digital artwork, it includes Photoshop Elements, which I used for years in high school and college before buying Photoshop. (The other models include it as well, except the Manga line, which includes Manga/Anime Studio. I left this line off my list because I’d rather have Photoshop, and it’s otherwise the same as Pen & Touch. )
~The Storyteller – Elementalist – Jade Quarry~
