Best Pens for 2024: Gel, Ballpoint, Rollerball, and Fountain Pens (opens in new tab)

- Traveling and shaking a vessel filled with ink doesn't end well.

- Getting ink on your hands when refilling the pen becomes annoying, quickly.

- Your notebook choices now become limited to ones that don't bleed. I already have notebooks that I've been using for years and don't want to change.

- Not all pens are suited for every language. If you get a pen with a wider nib (like a parker or american ones in general), it's very easy to blur on Chinese/Korean/Japanese etc. This is fixable with a smaller japanese nib but not really an issue with ballpoint pens.

--

Whenever I'm in Japan I usually stop by a store like kingdom note and I've picked up some pilor & sailor pens. I'm happy to use them at my desk, but I just stick to ballpoint pens like the Calme 0.7 when out and about.

And paper doesn't have to be expensive either. You can find good paper even at walmart if you are willing to look up some reviews or try some various brands.

Yes, my 20 year old ballpoint pen has dried out. But the vast majority of my ballpoints, gels, etc pens can all be picked up and written with without any regularity. My fountain pens have to be used daily, otherwise they cannot be used.

https://www.countrylife.co.uk/luxury/style/unparalleled-joy-...

Unfortunately, many (MANY) people have terrible (unpracticed) handwriting and view the activity as a means to an end rather than something worth doing for fun.

Everyone comments on how good my handwriting is. In response, I usually say that I "stole" someone's handwriting back in the 5th grade. The truth is that I really liked their handwriting and copied theirs over and over until I matched (and eventually exceeded) theirs years later. Same with cursive (which I can still write).

Conversely, most folks do handwriting drills in kindergarten/1st grade (US) and stop there.

I think everyone can learn how to write well, but it requires a ton of practice. Given that everything is done digitally these days, many would rather just type it out.

But the ballpoints are slightly better at being everyday pocket pens because they resist rough handling and improper storage. This becomes less true as you move up the price ladder into hybrid, gel and rollerball pens, but it's definitely the case if you're getting a Bic Stic or other classic oil-based ballpoint.

What I've noticed is that overall, if you care about the type and amount of drag on the pen, you end up moving away from gels and rollers. The oil-based pens have a kind of creaminess to them when you get them in large point sizes(e.g. Bic Xtra-Bold 1.6mm) that can be satisfying. But if you want things to be really crisp and controlled you need either the additional friction of felt tips or a sharp, fine nib.

If you haven't tried one, get a Speedball Hunt 102 nib and some dip ink. The nib needs the factory coating scrubbed off, and you'll need some tissue to clean up, but once you get past that part, the path is open to experience a pen that will absolutely carve up your paper.

A while back I heard the phrase "If you ask 'where is the good XYZ' it means you have a 'bad' XYZ". I was inspired to throw out all of my cheapo pens and always have a good one nearby.

Same with power cables, scissors, tape, and other small household accessories. They're too cheap to have to worry about 1. where they are and 2. where the "good" one is.

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.

You should be grateful that you have not been born a century earlier. When my father, who was also left-handed, was in elementary school (almost 90 years ago), it was still a practice to persuade the left-handed to write using their right hand by beatings.

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

Once you get it down it's no different than using a fine rollerball.

but of course it confuses the teachers at the school and they insist my kids use pencils at school...

tl;dr only use erasable pens for the least important writing, never ever use them for signatures.

1. Status symbols are frequently every-day objects elevated in some way. Montblanc pens were good status symbols to have on your desk when everyone used pens all the time, now they're anachronistic. So the upper end of the market shrinks as the item becomes less necessary.

2. Pens becoming less necessary for daily life makes them more of a hobby, and while people pretty much by definition are spending disposable income on a hobby they probably still have a budget in mind. Also, a lot of hobbies get kind of fuzzy between the hobby itself and collecting-as-a-hobby (is the hobby writing or is the hobby collecting pens?). A lot of people would rather own a small collection of affordable "pretty good" fountain pens with some differences between them instead of one really excellent pen.

3. The usual march of progress means a very good fountain pen can be manufactured for a lot less money than it could a few decades ago. That means businesses can serve that hobbyist market, and satisfy the craving for variety.

Same process that happens with lots of goods. Watches of any description used to be a luxury good, then cheap quartz movements were invented: the luxury market for Rolexes never went away, but a lot more people bought Timexes, and nobody really needs a watch anymore because we have cell phones, but there's still a hobbyist market. Nobody needs a turntable to play LPs anymore, but vinyl is a big hobby for probably a lot of the same nostalgia/"physical is good" reasons pens are a hobby, and you can get a very good sounding turntable today for a lot less money than you could 40 years ago.

Gel pens also support this, if you have a heavy pen body.

If you want tradition, you can buy vintage pens - they work great. The Parker 51 is usually claimed to be the epitome of fountain pens. They aren't luxury in any way - they don't even look like fountain pens, but they just write and write. Vintage Esterbrook pens have replaceable nib options that put any modern pen to shame.

I bought a budget fountain pen as an experiment - can I reduce waste and potentially save money? It has been a complete success, with the side effect that writing has become much more enjoyable. I ended up getting my kids the Pilot Kakuno - they have also found writing to be more enjoyable and their penmanship has improved dramatically as a result.

Expensive pens don't have any allure to me. I'm sure they're nice, and many of them write better than a budget pen, but... I wouldn't turn one down as a gift, but I'm not interested at all in buying one.

Fountain pens that work well without fuss, like Lamy Safari, or Pilot Metropolitan, really are nicer to use than ballpoint or gel pens, and the slight extra effort to using ink in cartridges or from a bottle adds familiarity and comfort to it. It’s not a pen, it’s your pen, and the longer you have it, the more attached you are to it. The more attached you are to it, the better the act of using it feels. It makes your world feel less disposable.

The flashy bits of an expensive fountain pen are just there to attract people. Rare wood, expensive metal accents, exclusive brand names don't do anything to add to the writing experience as a whole. Sure they make you feel good cause your in an exclusive club, and that is something, but that doesn't effect the way it writes.

There is value in jotting down notes legibly :)

Not sure but I wonder if there is some hipster youth trend where writing is making a comeback?

Ignore the haters who claim pigmented ink wrecks your pens--both my wife and I have drawn miles of lines with it, and even leaving it sitting on the desk unused for weeks, we never have a problem with it.

Edit: Also, Noodler’s Baystate Blue. If your pinky isn’t stained afterward, have you even written?

Oh wait, this is a $20 bottle of whiskey.

I now use a Pilot Custom 823 which is always going to be less sturdy than the Vanishing Point and my guess is it's always living on borrowed time. I'll replace it with a fine/medium VP when I eventually break it somehow.

The fact that it's only $15 on AliExpress makes it a steal. No pun intended.

I believe the Uni-ball One is a better pen body in every way. Tight tolerances. Well-built, hinged steel clip that provides superior fidgeting. Nicer clicker haptics too. I don't love the ink that comes in them, but they take Jetstream SXR-7 and SXR-5 refills. You can get both of these from JetPens.

But I've never actually had to put a refill in -- I bought a 3 pack of those about 8 years ago and they're still all going strong. I just don't write enough.

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.

https://www.jetpens.com/blog/The-Best-Pressurized-Ink-Pens/p...

They don't write as nicely as fountain or gel pens, but when you need to write on receipt paper or a waxed carton, they will work.

You can put the Fisher Space Pen refills in any pen that takes a Parker ballpoint refill.

I think everything I tried from that set so far worked well with fountain pens, though I did like some more than others. My favorite so far was probably the Mnemosyne notebook. The Rhodia webnotebook (not in the sample pack) is fantastic too.

For physics, math, general writing, I'm using Roaring Springs buff colored engineering pads (#15 paper type). Fairly fountain-pen friendly, though not as good as the papers in the above sampler set. I haven't found fountain pen paper with an engineering grid yet though, so it's the best compromise so far. The green 200 page pads are actually pretty good for fountain pens last I tried them, however the sheets were too thin for my taste and tended to eventually curl up where my forearm rested on them. Worth mentioning that the last time I bought these pads was back in 2020 when I got a 24 pack box that's still going strong, so it's possible paper quality has changed since then.

For reference, the pen I'm using is a Karas INK V2 with a EF Bock nib. Ink is Noodler's Black.

Bic makes a 0.9mm mech that I can usually find locally. Slide on a foam gripper for a better holding experience.