Review: Patio Galaxy 0.5 mm

I bet that you have never seen this pen and I am not surprised. I've seen and bought it only once and I'm totally not regretting it. 

Patio is a Polish brand (the site is in Polish), but I haven't found this pen in their catalog. Upon closer examination, you can see that many of their products look a great deal like world-famous pens (Pilot G2, Pilot Frixion, Stabilo Bionic Worker). Looks like this is not the case. Or can you remember some similar looking pen?

Maybe it's some older stock (ex. from year 2013 or even older)? Maybe it was some kind of co-operation between Patio manufacturer and Tesco vendor? Eh, mystery, fortunately not to be solved by us. 

But let's see how it writes!

It's a rollerball, so the showthrough and bleedthrough is quite significant on cheaper office paper. It doesn't bug me since I have lots of one-side prints to write on, but it would be a bit of a problem if used in cheaper notebooks or school exercise books (I came across 55 gsm exercise books here, that's pretty thin).

Pros:
+ smooth writing
+ crisp, clean line
+ really black
+ easy disassembling
+ washable ink

Cons:
- difficult (or impossible) to buy
- cap tends to fall off
- tends to bleedthrough and showthrough
- occasional scratchy ball

The three pens cost me 30 CZK (about 1 € or 1,2 USD) and seriously, they are worth much more. Shame I can't find them anywhere any more. It's so great pen!

Maped Freewiter Ball Point Pen 1.0

Shoot, have I really written "Frewriter"? Excuse me, this year's summer camp was really exhausting.

I found only one place that sold the refills and they are stating that those refills are discontinued now. So it's refillable as long as you can locate the refills - which seems to be quite a brain-teaser. Or maybe you can find a compatible refill. But it's a fairly good pen and can withstand really tough camp conditions. I was not expecting much from a 1.0 mm point, but I was pleasantly surprised. No skipping, no globs or blobs, comfortable grip and cool design. I prefer my fountain pens, but the summer camp conditions are not as great for fountain pens and inks, so this was a pleasant experience. 

Review: PaperMate InkJoy 500 RT

I wasn't too thrilled to find that this pen has a 1.0 mm ball, because I tend to prefer needle-tips and often find broad ballpoints skippy or too broad for my small handwriting, but this experience was not so bad. The pen is light in the hand and does not feel like it's going to cause you hand fatigue or cramps when writing extensively. The grip is rubberized and does not slip between your fingers. 

Let's see how it writes: (excuse my grammar mistakes)

Is my handwriting legible for you? (I'll try to figure out how to set the picture to read it comfortably. Just give me some time.)

Here you can see the colour-changing ink in action:
On the first picture the ink is really black. I mean a nice black. Not a greyish one. Also the globbing is not as bad.

And this is how the pen wrote after about an hour on the second page. The ink changed to something grey and also the globbing is much more visible.

I like the packaging. Maybe it's not really environmentally-friendly, but I like the blue-orange combination. 

I bought this pen on clearance, the black one for 25 CZK (1,25 USD or 1 EUR) and the blue one for 15 CZK (0,75 USD or 0,6 EUR). For such a little amount of money it is not a bad pen. Certainly it's one of the better ballpoints with broader tips. I wasn't really excited about the globs and colour changes but it writes smoothly and doesn't skip, which would bother me more. My notebooks won't be displayed publicly like Leonardo da Vinci's, but I still need them to be legible and this is better achieved with a colour-changing pen than a skippy pen.

Plus:
+ smooth writing
+ doesn't smear (even the globs don't smear much)

Minus
- colour changing
- globbing

Other reviews:
PenAddict
Stationery Review - all types of PaperMate InkJoy pens