I read this pen review the other day and made a mental note to give the Uniball 207 a try some time. I was out of town for business last week and needed to make a Wal-Mart run. As I stood in the checkout line, I saw the Uniball 207 on display, so I dropped down a $1.49 and decided to give it a try in my trusty Moleskine notebook when I got back to my hotel room. I've been using a blue Pilot G2 pen for quite a while and it's my favorite pen by far, but if something comes along that's better, I don't want to miss out.Why does it matter so much to me? I have no idea. I just care about the pens I use. If I'm going to care enough to write something down so I'll remember it later, then it seems only logical to me that I should use a pen that I enjoy using and that will do a good job of preserving what I've written. I don't write any of my books or magazine/newspaper articles by hand, but I do record things such as quotes, to-do lists, random thoughts, statistics, and various other things, by hand.
I hate fine point ink pens—the grating noise they make as they scratch across the paper makes my skin crawl. I prefer medium point ink pens, but regular medium point ink pens often splotch droplets of ink or they don't generate a consistent flow of ink—instead their flow resembles Morse code. Generally, I don't like gel pens of any width. First, their colors are too freaky for me. Second, they smear. Third, too many of them also have an inconsistent ink flow.
But the blue Pilot G2 pen is different. It's water resistant and fade resistant. Those are cool features. But according to Mike, they aren't chemical resistant. That's kind of a bummer, but I like the pen too much to stop using it. I love the way it writes—a dark, consistent, smooth line. No splotches or inconsistencies. The only thing I don't like is that it does smear in spite of what Pilot's advertisements say. But I've learned to live with this faux pas. I just make sure that I don't drag my hand across the page until the ink has had ample time to dry.
So, anyway...I tried the blue Uniball 207 that I picked up at Wal-mart the other day hoping that it would be all that the G2 pen is, but also hoping that it would be smear-proof. That would be the perfect pen in my opinion. Unfortunately, I'm not nearly as big a fan of the 207 as Mike is. The color of ink is an odd shade of light blue—maybe turquoise? I don't know color variations very well, and I'm partially color blind. I just know that I really don't like the 207 blue ink nearly as much as blue ink in the G2. I also don't like the inconsistent ink flow. It's not as bad as a regular ink pen, but still unacceptable to me.
Maybe Mike and I should exchange pens. He can send me his unused, unwanted G2 pen(s) and I can send him my hardly used, certainly unwanted, 207.
