Editing The Pen Addict 533/transcript (section)

== Top Five Pens List ==


'''Myke:''' And I'll admit that it's definitely more of a U.S.-centric list, right? It's the stuff that I see physically in stores, you know, grocery stores, office supply stores, convenience stores, things that are just hanging, you know, on the pegs, on the shelf that, you know, passersby might try to figure out, hey, I might want a little bit better pen than, you know, the junkie ballpoint that I stole from the bank or whatever, you know, things like that. So that's what this list is. And I think it's an important one because that's how a lot of us get started with determining that, hey, there's certain pens that make my handwriting better or there's certain pens that I can hold that are more comfortable or, you know, hey, this one has great purple ink and all kinds of things. And this eventually you buy you buy fake Batman pens like I do. And you've you kind of graduate from this, but you never leave. You never leave these pens behind, right? There are just classic standby pens, primary use pens for a lot of people, including myself a lot of times. So the Pentel Energel is number one. And as I said in my write up, I don't find it to be particularly close. So that's my hot take on this when you're comparing it to what most people would say prefer the Pilot G2, maybe the Sharpie S gel. Maybe one of the Uni balls, things like that. So everyone has a favorite pen they go in and buy from the store shelf. I think the Energel is better than your favorite pen. That's my stance. I'm sticking to it. It has the best refill. It is the smoothest, most consistent refill. And again, a lot of these pens on the shelf, you're starting at 0.7 millimeters, right? Like this isn't my like perfect pen for me. This is my recommendation for you, for a lot of people trying things out. It's the best gel ink. It's the best performing pen from a quality and consistency standpoint. They have the best color range and the best color performance. And the barrels are built great. They're just good, right? They have almost no questions, you know, or no sacrifices you have to make compared to like some of these others on the list. I think they're probably like the perfect off the shelf pen. Historically, I've put Jetstream here at the top a lot and we'll get to why I've moved it down the list here in a minute. But I found myself for the past year or two just always saying, if you're going to go to the store shelf or if people ask me, like, what's your favorite pen? You know, I know they're not asking me like, hey, what's my favorite, you know, fountain pen? And, you know, hey, did you get that new limited edition sailor? No, they're asking me like, hey, what's a pen that I know that is your favorite? It's always the Energel. That's the answer.

'''Myke:''' The Pilot Precise V5 has been on and off this list for years. I think it probably deserves a permanent home and that home is at number two on this list. That could change, you know, if one of these other pen makers makes like a little bit of an improvement in their offering or their product lineup. But I think the Pilot Precise is almost, yeah, it's so ubiquitous. Just like the Pilot G2, like Pilot has a stranglehold on this category. Like there's no doubt. It's the Pilot G2 and the Pilot Precise. And then anything Pilot V series related. Those are, most people will be very, very familiar with all of those. This pen has been around at least since the 80s, maybe the late 70s. And it has changed very little. And that's a testament to just how good it is, right? It is legitimately good. It's a rollerball ink, right? So it's a liquid, water-based ink, unlike the gel or ballpoint ink. So it can bleed on papers. But for some reason, this formulation, it does a lot better job than most pens with that. This is a lot of people's favorite pen, right off the store shelf. The V5 is the 0.5mm tip. The V7 is the 0.7mm tip. They come in a few different colors, if you like. But the basic black of this pen is just rock-solid workhorse. Works on so many different paper types. You'll see a lot of these around offices, just because they're just so good for what they are. Number three, the Uniball Signo 207. So this is another pen that's, it hasn't been around as long as the Precise. But it's been around more than a decade, maybe 15 years.

'''Myke:''' I actually thought it was going to go away when they launched the 307, which is the newer model. Because the number says so, Myke. That's the rule. But the 307 has a different ink formulation, and I don't like it as much. It's good. Like, it's perfectly fine. If the 207 didn't exist, I'd be thrilled with the 307. I think the 207's better. The one flaw, if you will, of the 207 and 307 is they probably have the worst clip on this list. It's a very cheap feeling for what's a very good pen. And a lot of people don't like that. So I will tend to, that's the second gel ink pen on the list, but I would always recommend the Energel first. None of these are going to have like rock star clips, right? Like you're in a price point that doesn't allow for that. But I think the 207 is probably the worst clip of the bunch. But I like the line of the 207 better than most right outside the Energel. Up number four is a new entry, the Paper Mate Ink Joy. It's really close to the Energel. Like, it's a new-ish gel ink pen. It's been around less than five years. That's pretty new for this category. There's not a lot of turnover in this category. That's another topic to get into, right? These things are pretty static. Pilot Precise has been around for 40 years. Cigna 207, you know, 15 plus years. All of these things. Jetstream has been around for forever, right? There's not a lot of turnover here. So you're hoping for some new, some company to like rethink what they're offering. And Paper Mate did that. Where traditionally, like I would dismiss Paper Mate because I've had just poor experiences in the past. Um, I got to try some of these Ink Joys years ago. And I was like, huh, I can't believe I'm saying this, but this is great. Like, it completely surprised me. They have a great range of colors. I love the feel of their barrel. They kind of have that rubberized texture on the outside of the barrel. I personally like. I think some people don't like that. But, um, they're really good. They have a retractable model. They have a capped model, depending on what you like. All the same refill. And it's really, really good. Number five is the Jetstream. The Uniball Jetstream. That was formerly number one on this list, which hadn't been updated in a couple years. And like, it's, I'm totally fine with it being number one. The reason I moved it down is just strictly a recommendation from a recommendation perspective. If I'm thinking about what's the order of operations here, if I'm talking about this to someone who doesn't know anything, what am I going to tell them to check out? Well, it's, the Jetstream needs to be not number one on that list because it's kind of particular, right? It's a ballpoint-ish ink, right? It's the hybrid ballpoint ink technology. It's really smooth. It's really awesome. If you come to me and say, hey, I'm a student. I write, you know, dozens of pages of notes a week. And I need a pen that's comfortable. Looks great. It's legible. It's not going to run out of ink quickly. My number one recommendation is going to be the Jetstream, right? It's never going to be a gel ink pen. But in the category, I think it's further down the list, right? So that's my, that's why I moved it down. Even though, like, I could, it's going to still be a number one recommendation for certain situations. I think in the general sense of things, it's probably deserves to be a little bit further down the list. So that's my top five off the store shelf. This is a pretty broad category. Like, even though I say there's not a lot of change in here, the Sharpie S pen was the only real change or the real new product in the last few years that got anyone interested in this category. It's pretty, it's pretty good. Like, I thought it was okay. You know, it's not better than the Energel or the Signo or the Ink Droid of me. But that still puts it like in a top five gel pen category. I think the Pilot G2 is probably a top five gel pen category, right? I just think, you know, there's a few that are better. That doesn't mean those pens are bad. Like, and they're certainly a valid choice. I didn't count store brands. Like, here in the U.S., most of the big office supply retailers have their own store brands. Some of them are shockingly good. So the Tool Pen, which we've talked about years ago. That's an OfficeMax special, I think. Is that OfficeMax? I think so. So it's a fantastic gel ink pen, but it's only at that store, right? Like, you're not going to the grocery store and finding that on the shelf. So I didn't count those.

'''Myke:''' The Paper Mate Flare and Sharpie Pen, like the non-permanent Sharpie. Both of those are great pens for very specific uses, right? They're felt tip or plastic tip pens. So they don't have the durability, but they're going to handle the one job well that you need them to do. Whether it's like marker, drawing, even writing. But they're not going to last as long as, you know, your gel pens and your Jetstream tips and things like that. My only wish is that I could rank Zebra somewhere in this category, right? They land at number two in the top five micro gel ink pens because that's kind of an open shopping category. I'm telling you to go online and find a 0.4 millimeter Zebra psoracic clip. I can't tell you to do that at the store. And Zebra's ballpoint and gel pens and rollerball pens just aren't better than the rest of these. And they could be. Like, I think Zebra in Japan, you know, maybe we'll see the blend more over here. We're starting to see it. They introduced a gel pen. They have, like, the little blister packs you can buy at the store now. They're just not prevalent enough to get up there. I don't know if the blend would crack my top five if it was more readily available. Even if it, you know, even if you could walk out the door and fall into a blend, I don't know that it would be. I still don't know that it would crack this top five list. It would at least be in the top ten, though. And I don't know. I wish Zebra was a little bit better in the U.S. market, you know, with their offerings. But they're just not quite there. So that's the top five pens in the store. The next two lists are going to be very challenging, and I'm going to rework them completely. The next two lists on my top five list, because I'm going to order the top five fountain pens under $50 and the top five fountain pens between $50 and $100, I'm going to change those categories. We're going to take a, we're going to do, we're going to do, like, a strict beginner category, first fountain pen category, and then we're going to do, like, the next fountain pen or the step-up fountain pen category to kind of solve the issues that I have in the 0 to 100 price point. Because there's some weird stuff. There's so many great pens that range from $5 to, say, like, $80 that answer so many different questions. That's such a huge range that I want to kind of describe my recommendations in those groups a little bit better than just having a strictly price point-based list for those. But, yeah, we'll see. That's something I'm going to tackle here in the next couple of weeks, and we will definitely spend some time talking about that. You'll probably have some commentary when I finish up with that.

'''Brad:''' I like that you're going through all of this.

'''Myke:''' It's long overdue. It really is. It's one of those, you know, it's one of those on the permanent list of things to do. And, you know, I gave myself a format and a process to get it done. So hopefully I can do the whole thing before the end of the year. So it's going to be a lot of updates. But now that most of my, like, my travel's done, I can schedule out this writing a little bit better and thinking about these different categories, you know, and spend a few hours a week thinking about them and getting them updated because some of them haven't been updated in years. So it's well past due. So we'll get that done here hopefully by the end of the year. And I'm actually looking forward to it because, you know, I want to see what's changed.

'''Brad:''' You know the idea of the Golden Gate Bridge always being painted?

'''Brad:''' Right? That, like, as soon as they finish it, they have to start at the start again? Right, right. That's what this is like. It's what the top ten's are like. As soon as you finish the last top ten, you have to start back on the first one again.

'''Myke:''' Exactly. That's why if I can, like, condense it into, like, four or five months, they're at least all relatively close. And then I could probably take, like, a year off. But then I would have to do, like, the entire thing again in about a year. So I used to do it once a year to update it. And then that some, the problem was some lists just didn't change in a year. Right? It wasn't a wide enough sample for anything to happen in there that would cause change. So then I would just start picking them off, like, one at a time. And then it just kind of got all discombobulated. So it's due for a full refresh. We're going to, we've started painting, Myke. I don't know when we're going to finish. Hopefully by the end of the year.

'''Brad:''' All right. What have we got lost up today?

'''Myke:''' I thought this was an interesting little thought experiment, accidental thought experiment I had on Instagram the other day. And apparently it's not a unique thought because everyone was like, yes, I do this too. So what I did the other night, I was done with work. Right? So whatever my work day was involved. I think this was Monday.

'''Myke:''' And I didn't really have any plans. Or maybe it was Tuesday. I don't know what day it was. It was one night. Sunday night, maybe. Whatever. I didn't have any plans that night. So there wasn't really much on TV to watch or really anything to do. Or I was going to do something else. I wasn't interested in writing or reading or watching entertainment TV. So I think I just honestly, I think I just got my phone out and was just scrolling. But I went before I did that. I didn't have any plans on using my pens or paper or anything. But I went and grabbed a notebook, my plotter, and two cases of pens and brought them with me to where I was going to sit and watch TV or just be mindless scrolling on the Internet and sat up next to me. I was like, I had to have these things next to me. So I took a picture and put it on Instagram. I said, do you ever just want your stationary stuff nearby, even if you have no plans to use it? Yeah, me too. And the whole reply was that this is your emotional support, right? This is your comfort zone. This is a ritual. You know, like Anthony said, you know, I've accepted that pens are a comfort and a control ritual. A hundred percent. I was like, I didn't I didn't think of it this way. But like everyone is like replying the same thing. And I've just wondered, like, did you do you have any of this stuff? Like Eric from Amarillo Stationery is like emotional support stationary. That's why I said that, you know, like I was like, yeah, it's like emotional support stationary. And like that's all this journey that we're all on together. Like we're all kind of tied by these same things, but we all use them in different ways and have different use cases and different thoughts and ideas. But sometimes I don't need to use any of it. It just needs to be near me and I need to be have the idea that it's there and therefore I'm comfortable. So I don't know if you've ever experienced anything like that in anything. It doesn't have to be stationary. But it's like, yeah, like just have it nearby and everything is right in the world.

'''Brad:''' I mean, I used to do this more when I was a kid and I still do it to a point now. Like I remember specifically when I was a kid, if I got a new toy, that toy would sit next to me. Like I would like even like sit it down. Like if we're watching TV and like it sits next to me. And I have a kind of kept this in my life since. Like if I get something new, something that I'm excited about, I kind of always want it around and in reach. It's like part of the appreciation process for me.

'''Myke:''' Right. And that night that I took this picture, I never opened any of the cases, never opened any of the notebooks. They literally like they were just there. And like I thought, I don't know, maybe I'll use something later. They never did, but they had to be there. I promise you. Because where I sat this stuff in my house is not where any of my, I'm not nearby any of my stationary stuff. So I brought it with me, sat it next to me and it just sat there and I did other stuff. But it was there. So there you go. I thought it was interesting because I didn't really give too much thought into it. I was just like, oh, this is something that I do and it makes me feel comfortable. And is this normal? And it's like, I guess it kind of is. Like everyone's like, yeah, I kind of do it too. It's like we all have our little things and our little comfort zones that we'd like to be in. And apparently mine is having my stationary sit right next to me, even if I have no intention of using it.

'''Brad:''' All right. If you would like to catch the show notes for this week's episode, go to relay.fm slash penaddict slash 533. If you want to find Brad online, he is at penaddict.com. He is at Dowdyism on Twitter, penaddict on Instagram. And you go to twitch.tv slash penaddict where Brad streams three times a week. Thank you to Pen Chalet and the Canalea Penco for the support of this week's episode. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Brad. Goodbye, Brad.

[[Category:Podcast Transcripts]]
[[Category:The Pen Addict Podcast Transcript]]