Don't worry, despite the dramatic title it's not THAT serious!
Batman © DC Entertainment; Image edited for purpose of parody!
I came home from work (the paying day job) last night and decided to do some work (the non paying creative job) to find my beloved Cintiq24HD mysteriously dark. On a restart, the screen faithfully showed my computer desktop... for about a half a second before going dark once more. Hardly enough time to get some artwork in! (Unless I was the Flash, but that goes without saying...)
An initial half hour of reboots, driver checks, and cable checks yielded no improvement. A further half hour of online research yielded similar tales of woe with no sure fix. While further effort would most likely find it to be repairable, the costs wouldn't be cheap on a fairly specialized piece of equipment. Most folks cited shipping and repair with Wacom clocking in at over $1000. Some users found that the problem can be intermittent and trying the Cintiq on different days could lead to finding it working, albeit temperamentally! Alas, using a workflow with a rather fickle piece of equipment doesn't sound very appealing to me.
So today the studio got some rearranging done to it... the mighty Cintiq currently occupies some floor space in the closet and there's a lot more desk space. I'd be more upset if I hadn't already begun working more and more on an iPad Pro. Obviously it will now be picking up all the chores of my digital art workflow, and we'll see how it goes! I've had the Cintiq about 6 or 7 years, so I can't be too hard on it for failing at this point.
I will be looking into Astropad Studio as a means of linking up my iPad Pro with my Mac to essentially make it a Cintiq replacement, so that I can make use of some full software packages when I choose, such as Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint, although ProCreate on the iPad is a very capable standalone program. As I explore it's capabilities I'll be sure to post about it for anyone interested.
But for a moment, please join me in mourning for a fallen Cintiq. (It was a lot more useful than Jason Todd was as Robin... That joke goes out to all my graphic arts comic geeks... if you got it, you're one of them)