Should you buy a Surface Pen for the Surface Pro 6?

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.