Pentel TRF100 Tradio Fountain Pen - Medium Nib - Black Pearl Body - Blue Ink

When I saw that Pentel had a very affordable fountain pen I was excited. Generally I love their roller balls and I thought this could be a good pen. So here's the silly thing, the first thing they do is include a full size ink cartridge (bonus!) that has two different ends.. oh. Which one am I supposed to use? I tried the parker compatible end but could not get the pen to pierce the opening, so I flipped it and tried the international end. That seemed to work.

However, once I got the ink flowing the pen had very nice bold lines that never skipped. It's much more of an American medium than a Japanese one. (feels > 1.0mm). The pen is light and the clear windows in the cap let you see the nib when the cap is on.

The reason I rated it so low however is the cap, it keeps slipping off the pen when it's posted (placed on the back of the pen during writing). It clicks into place just fine when closing the pen, but there's not enough friction between the barrel and the pen cap for it to stay on and during writing. After a few minutes it will "squirm" loose then just flop off. I personally find this annoying. It's a shame really because otherwise it's a nice writing pen for the money.

This pen was a real pleasure to start using. I was first struck by the slightly rubberized texture of the body of the pen, which lends towards both a comfortable grip and nice control feel. No trouble with the cap staying on the end as you write. The instrument is a lightweight fountain pen and came writing smoothly right out of the mailer. Noted, however, that it is having a hard time keeping up ink-wise on the larger swoops of my writing. That said, it's new and it is not dragging or scratching. Writes like a fine nib in my opinion. This will definitely find a great general use slot in my collection. The color is fun and appealing, well represented in the accompanying image by JetPens. I am satisfied at the price and will very likely purchase another.

This pen is a ball-point fountain pen. It's extremely stiff despite the gold plate on the nib. It was scratchy at first, but after writing a couple pages of notes it was fine. There is zero line variation and it does not write very wetly (so it doesn't waste ink). However, it can still keep up with rapid note-taking, which is good.

The pen is very aesthetically pleasing because of its gold nib and shiny white-gold body (that looks like a brighter shade of silver). The pen so far has resisted scratching even though I've really only been placing it on a table or carrying it around in a soft case, and the body color looks as if it was painted on (the inside of the cap is white). The clip is part of the cap instead of being a movable clip and the window is a nice touch.

The medium nib writes on the thinner side of most mediums I've seen. It is a tad bit thinner than the Lamy Safari's medium nibs. It writes about as thick as a 0.7 mm pen. I use it with a Pelikan C499 converter filled with Oxblood Red ink, although it fits all standard converters and ink cartridges (even long ones, which is great for taking long pages of notes).

Unfortunately, the cap does not click onto the other end when posted and thus is not as secure as I would've liked it. However, I haven't had an issue with it sliding off because it hugs the pen body quite well and I have small hands that don't interfere with the clip too much. The pen is light, although I wouldn't call it the lightest pen ever, but it is light enough to make writing quite comfortable.

Overall, I'm surprised that a handsome pen like this wasn't selling for a knockout-high price. It comes with a large blue ink cartridge that I didn't really use. It's very appealing even though the plastic body seems strange compared to the gold-plated nib and is good for writing notes and things that don't need line variation (which covers almost everything that I do). The value of this pen is great!

OMG! I need!!! I neeeeeed!!!