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Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens

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Re: Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens

#41

Post by buescher »

bambax wrote: post #22

I'm surprised there's a market for budget foutain pens. We mostly don't write by hand anymore and if we do, it's to jolt down notes. One chooses to use a fountain pen for the thrill of it, or for love of tradition. In those cases, money is no object. A budget fountain pen is like a budget race car. Obviously I'm wrong, but I'm not sure why.

Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens are ridiculously good for their price, and if you leave one out on your desk and someone comes along and damages the nib trying to write with it, you just throw the whole thing away. On top of that I haven't had one leak and they very rarely dry out or get clogged.

Re: Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens

#42

Post by anononaut »

I use a multipen, a pen with multiple ink cartridges that can switch on the fly. Just like the one you had as a kid! I use four colors plus black for my day-to-day engineering journal. I use the colors for semantic highlighting. By default, I write in black. People, teams, and customers are in blue. I also annotate some things with blue arrows and words. Dates and very important notes are in red. Projects and tickets are in green. Meetings are in purple (with blue attendees).

I also do some clever things like separating days with black lines and a little box for the date, but the first day of the week is red so I can easily see week boundaries. As a whole, it makes scanning for what I'm looking for very easy. Since I usually know at least what meeting a decision was made in. Or if I'm looking for my notes about a teammate, that's another color. I've been doing this for four years and have really refined my process.

My pen of choice is a Coleto 5-color multipen. They are a pretty cheap plastic and I'm not in love with it. It's just the best I've used with five colors. For ink cartridges I use Pilot Hi-Tec-C, 0.4 mm. I highly recommend it, but start with a day book to see if it's useful to you first.

Re: Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens

#43

Post by iaw »

valyagolev wrote: post #18

After discovering Muji Gel pens a decade ago I just buy them tens at a time (pens or refill sticks). They feel absolutely perfect and are very easy to obtain in Europe. It's a great feeling to find a product that works so well you can free your mind from the burden of search forever

I cannot endorse Muji enough. They are also easy to obtain in the US. I save my empty pens so I can refill them. I just got a full color set to use as well.

The ink flow levels are always balanced, never too much or too little. It's hard to explain but it also has a good "feel" when writing that I do not find in many other pens.

Re: Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens

#44

Post by vel0city »

I really wanted to get into fountain pens a while ago. I bought several different ones over the years and ultimately had roughly the same experience. In the end I didn't find them great for me, being a lefty in a right-to-left writing world. The main benefits of the fountain pen feel is when you're able to just lightly drag the pen across the paper, its nearly effortless to put down a good line. However, being a lefty, I'm often pushing the pen forward instead of dragging it across.

I just kind of feel like writing as a lefty in a right-to-left world is just pain.

Any other lefties have similar experiences?

Re: Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens

#45

Post by OJFord »

piva00 wrote: post #25
iancmceachern wrote: post #2

My wife and I love fountain pens! It's an awesome hobby and collection to start

Honest question: what makes it a hobby and not just a collection? I think of pens as tools for a hobby but not as a hobby itself, collecting pens I can consider a collection hobby though. I get confused because I've seen this stated a few times and it does not make sense to me, there's no "power drill hobby" but one can have a hobby of collecting power drills.

I suppose if you spend time researching, reading about, talking about (online fora etc.) the thing you collect then it starts to look more like a hobby.

Re: Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens

#46

Post by nighthawk454 »

Recently got a LAMY Safari and it's been really great (coming from 0.5mm Uniball Signo DX). Got an ultra-fine nib and black ink for it and it's my daily driver pen now. Also tried the aluminum LAMY AL-Star and was surprised I liked the Safari better. The AL-Star is slightly heavier with a less-ideal weight distribution for me and is also slightly thicker.

Re: Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens

#47

Post by EwanG »

Bought a Fisher Millennium Space Pen in 2000 which came with a lifetime guarantee for the Pen AND the Ink. Here it is 2024 and it still writes just fine. Have not had to get a refill yet (though not sure if they would honor it still).

So I'd argue that might be the "Best Pen" for at least some of us :-)

Re: Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens

#48

Post by EwanToo »

vel0city wrote: post #44

I really wanted to get into fountain pens a while ago. I bought several different ones over the years and ultimately had roughly the same experience. In the end I didn't find them great for me, being a lefty in a right-to-left writing world. The main benefits of the fountain pen feel is when you're able to just lightly drag the pen across the paper, its nearly effortless to put down a good line. However, being a left…

Writing was definitely designed by right handed people!

There is some hope though, I've not found a nice fountain pen experience but there's some gel pens which are pretty hard to make smudge.

I use these:

Uni-Ball Jetstream Sport SXN-150S Ballpoint Gel Pens. Premium 1.0mm Rollerball Tip. https://amzn.eu/d/6mVJHLS

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