Review: Pentel Floatune Rollerball
About a week ago my wife and I were browsing Staples - for perhaps the first time in months. Neither of us can remember the last time we were there for more than a few minutes. As we are wont to do, we went down the pen aisle to see if there was anything new and exciting.
Or rather, more specifically, my wife was trying to find a pen that she used during a softball game two nights prior after she was told it the person got it from Staples. We didn't find that pen, but we came away instead with a Pentel Floatune retractable rollerball. If someone tries to tell you those bins that let you try out pens don't work, ignore them. They definitely do.
I took a break from running my BIC pen dry to test out this pen. It's been almost a week so I thought I would review it.
It writes very smoothly; I'm not usually a fan of fine-tip pens, gel or otherwise, but because it's a rollerball it's very smooth and doesn't feel like I'm scratching the page.
It also doesn't smudge or bleed very easily on the pages I'm using. One notebook is a Moleskine planner, which has very thin paper, and the other is a much thicker paper. Obviously it performs best on the latter because of the page thickness, but other than the words on the other side of the page being a little darker, I don't see a noticeable difference from when I was using my black ballpoint. It doesn't ghost to the point that I can't read what's on the opposite side, which is a plus.
It also doesn't smudge easily, which is my main complaint when using anything that's not a ballpoint. My hand usually ends up covered in ink and my pages are smeared all over the place. Not so with the Floatune.
Overall I'm impressed, but not enough to make this a "daily driver". I am still a ballpoint stan - give me ballpoint or give me a good mechanical pencil. But it's satisfying to use as something to change things up for a bit. I included a sample below of the writing, including some decidedly unscientific smudge tests.
You can see that there is still some smudging occurring after 5 seconds but it's noticeably less than immediately after writing.
