Hi! I'm mostly familiar with Wacom tablets, so I can give you my two cents on those
The one I have is a Bamboo CTL-470. It's a cheap (I paid around ~$50) tablet, but it's pretty good for its price. If you're new to digital art, the features it offers should be enough. The pen could be more comfortable, but it's not terrible and it does not use batteries. The surface is nice!-- I've been wearing it down for more than the past two years and it still holds up... considering I've been using it more to play osu! than draw, it's quite an achievement
There was this confusing thing that Wacom did: in a nutshell, they "renamed" their Bamboo product line to Intuous and since they already had Intuous product line, they renamed it to Intuous Pro. And they've released Intuous CTL-480 and CTL-490 which are technically successors to the old Bamboo model that I have. Those two tablets seem like a direct upgrade to me. I've got to play around with the CTL-480 and I definitely liked it much better than my model. The pen was a little bit more comfortable and the surface felt much better while drawing. There are some programmable keys on the tablet that aren't present on the CTL-470. Can't say much about the CTL-490, but I expect it to be just as decent, at the very least...
Now they've also variations of these models that include a touch sensor.. These models are labeled CTH instead of CTL. It might be convenient, but for me, it's not necessary and definitely not something I'd be paying an extra $30 for...
Either way the CTL models should be available for ~80$ or less. However, CTL-470 is discontinued, and probably so is the CTL-480, by now. If you look, you can probably still find them on Amazon or e-bay, etc, but I'd say the latest CTL-490 is a great bet. Those all should be really great entry-level tablets IMO.
Intuous Pro models or, let alone, Cintiq, are on a whole different level, but those are a few times more expensive, so...
