Well, I thought that I’d write another quick article about rollerball pens today. If you haven’t heard of these before, they’re like a cross between a ballpoint pen and a fountain pen. They have the user-friendly nib of a ballpoint, but their feed system and the type of ink that they use is a lot closer to what you’d find in a fountain pen. Common brands of rollerball pens include the “Uni-Ball Eye” (or “Uni-Ball Vision” in the US) and the “Pilot V Ball”.
Like any type of pen, they have both advantages and disadvantages. For example, they write much more smoothly and boldly than a ballpoint pen, but they get through ink more quickly and require slightly sturdier paper (to avoid “bleed-through” etc...). But I want to focus on one of the less well-known advantages I’ve found.
This is all totally anecdotal, based on experience. I haven’t had time to conduct lengthy scientific tests or anything like that, and this possibly also varies from pen to pen as well (depending on the design and ink formulation). But, on the whole, I’ve noticed that rollerball pens have a longer “shelf-life” than ballpoint pens do.
Case in point, when I almost ran out of working pens in 2020, I found some old ballpoint pens from the mid-late 2000s and literally none of them worked. Likewise, the refill in an old “Parker Jotter” ballpoint (probably also from the 2000s) which I found last year had also well and truly dried up.
On the other hand, whilst searching the deepest reaches of my other desk for notebooks last spring, I stumbled across an old 0.5mm “Pilot V Ball” rollerball pen – probably from the early-mid 2010s at the latest – and it still works absolutely perfectly. Likewise, I’ve used “Uni-Ball Eye” pens which are maybe 3-10 years old without any issues.
On a side-note: Gel pens (pens with a ballpoint nib but which use gel ink) seem to have a much more variable shelf life. When I found some old scented gel pens from the early-mid 2000s, they had all dried up. Ditto some cheap gel pens from the late 2000s/very early 2010s. But I also found an old “Pentel EnerGel” pen from the 2000s which, surprisingly, still writes.
Anyway, getting back to the main point, I think that this is possibly less of an advantage of rollerball pens and more a disadvantage of ballpoint pens. At a pure guess, because ballpoint ink is a lot thicker and less watery than rollerball ink, it’s probably more prone to “drying out” because there’s less water there in the first place.
Interestingly, this seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the common “air hole” safety feature on pen caps. Since, looking at the rollerball pens on my desk, literally all of them seem to have air holes in their caps. On the “Uni-Ball Eye” pens, they tend to be slightly concealed on the top of the cap (in the 0.7mm version, it appears to be in the “pupil” of the eye design and, on the 0.5mm it’s a thin slit next to the top of the clip).
Anyway, although this isn’t exactly a proper scientific study or anything, it’s something that I’ve definitely noticed. It probably varies from pen to pen, but rollerball pens definitely seem to stand up to prolonged disuse a lot better than ballpoint pens do.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting