Introduction
I have been trying out a few of our pens lately and thought I would do some brief notes about them. These are currently all in stock on our website and the price estimates I’ve noted in the photos are from 05/09/22. Click on the images for a bigger, clearer view of the writing samples.
Ballpoint
Figure 1: Some of Easyink’s range of ballpoint pens in use.
- Pilot BeGreen Rexgrip ballpoint, medium 1.00 mm blue (black available as pen/refill)
- stylish rubber grip with slight bulge in barrel making it very comfortable to use
- Pilot Supergrip G ballpoint, medium 1.00 mm blue (black available as pen/refill)
- cross hatched grip
- Icon ballpoint in blue, black, green and red
- very affordable, 4 colours
Pilot gel pens
Figure 2: Some of Easyink’s gel pen range in use.
- Frixion Clicker 0.7 mm (“fine”) blue pen with black refill currently in it
- thick barrel with rubber grip, gel flows easily, very comfortable to write with, clicks with the shirt clip which is a little odd at first but you get used to it
- also available in 1.0 mm (“broad”) tip size and black, red, green and blue-black
- Pilot G2 gel 0.7 mm blue
- also has a sturdy barrel and good grip, similar writing experience to Frixion but not erasable unless you put a Frixion refill in it which actually you can – more traditional clicker style (top)
- Pilot B2P Gel 0.7 mm blue
- rapidly became my favourite – also very easy to write with, doesn’t have a rubber grip but the bottle-style barrel is thick and the grooves in it make it very nice to hold – I’m reaching for it all the time
- Pop’lol pens lying around the office that needed reviving by soaking in very hot water (not pictured)
- I dug some of these out of the office stationery cupboard and found them dried up (they’re years old, we think) – for fun, I followed the suggestions on JetPens’ blog for getting gel pens to work again and it worked, so now I have a purple and a yellow gel pen to play with (or to give my 5 year old to colour with, most likely!)
- Notice that these gel pens in Figure 2 have 0.7 mm tips and are called “fine”, compared to the ballpoint pens in Figure 1 which are 1.0 mm and called “medium”, but the gel pens actually produce thicker lines due to the higher ink flow (I assume)
Pilot MR fountain pen
Figure 3: Pilot MR3 fountain pen in use.
I keep this MR3 pen in my bag, and usually fill it with Pilot ink from a bottle which works well (the bottle is going to last me for years) but recently popped in an IC-50 Pilot ink refill to see how they worked – super easy to pop in, works really well. Either way, I enjoy using this pen and its never once leaked in my bag or dried out despite sometimes not being used for weeks and weeks. Plus, it looks really cool! There is a ballpoint version also, and other colours.
I have reviewed some fountain inks (Iroshizuku and Herbin), including some Herbin ink cartridges, in this blog post. You can use these for watercolour and calligraphy too.
Concluding Remarks
When I first became involved in putting the Pilot and Icon pens on our webshop, I did rather wonder why there were so many similar pens and why people bought them….after diving into the world of pens, I get it. I wish I’d had some good gel pens with nice sturdy grippy barrels for taking all the lecture notes I wrote back in the day! My hands wouldn’t have gotten so sore!
The Pilot ballpoints are nice too – I love the ease of writing with the gel pens but these ballpoints are also really nice to write with and quicker-drying/long-lasting. The affordable Icon ballpoints are great for sending to school where they seem to disappear into a black hole. We have a pen for everyone! Check out our Icon range here and our Pilot range here!
