Cintiq!

 Thanks to the generosity of my parents, I am now the proud owner of the 22HD Cintiq.  For a long time I had been using a tablet pc (the HP tm2t, which was pretty good) as my main digital drawing tool.  Tablet pc's are nice because they are full on laptops, and therefore portable and convenient, and I thought more than good enough for doing art.  I figured that using a cintiq couldn't be that different from using my laptop for drawing and painting, but I was totally wrong.  The Cintiq is so sensitive, way more so than the tablet pc.  It has so many functions as well, including the sixteen buttons and two touchstrips on the back.

When I opened the box, I realized why these things are so expensive (they are overpriced, even though they're totally awesome); it's the highest end professional tool an artist can buy.  The intuos tablets would probably be, since it's the same technology, but the Cintiq is simply on a different level from that. The one thing I can definitely say about it, is that it makes the process much faster.  Coloring takes a lot less time than it would with any other tablet, and it's easier to make it look better.  Because the screen is so big, I can zoom in more without having to constantly reposition the picture or move around a ton.  I also have a ton of hotkeys, not to mention the two buttons on the pen and the eraser.  And, unlike my laptop, I can have a keyboard available at anytime, so I can use any hotkey that I don't have programmed.
It is a fantastic piece of technology... and I don't think anyone would regret buying it, though it is such a huge investment.

And here is some samples of what I've done with it.  Most of them are just coloring, but there's a couple drawings as well :)