Wednesday 13 August 2008

Uni-Ball Grip Roller

Another Uni-Ball. Again, I'm a Pilot and Uni-Ball guy, but Pilots aren't easily found here, so I use UB mostly.




UB-247 BLUE
UPC/EAN 4902778747001

This is a nice pen, the first and last one that I owned was back 5 or so years ago and if I recall correctly, they were different. They had a grey barrel, the cap was slightly different, and the color was indicated by a small cap in the cap and the grip too I believe.
I hadn't used a roller pen with a foam/felt reservoir (all were liquid ink stored in a tank) and they feel good, this is a bold/medium point, so glides really good on bond paper. It does exhibit some bleed, but for me it doesn't represent a problem, since I rarely write on both sides of the paper.

I don't know how long does the ink last, not much I guess, I've left the pen uncapped for hours, and I do recall leaving my old 247 completely dry.


Color availability isn't huge, black blue and red, and your choice of medium or fine point. The grip is a nice offering, I believe that none of the Visions are available with a grip (except for the Vision Exact if it's still made and maybe the Vision RT -Haven't seen one ever). What you do lose with the UB-247 is the ink window, so you can unexpectedly run out of ink, but that's pretty much normal with most pens that have a similar ink storage system.




EDIT:
I just found the old ones I'm talking about. I found in a Turkish website both models, and the old ones are called UB-145/147. Below are the UB-147 (0.7mm) ones. I was wrong on the grip, it's dark grey in all colors.

4 comments:

Zach said...

I really feel like this is a pretty classy, low-key appearance pen. The 0.5 is quite fine for a roller ball but ink application seems to vary more with paper type than a comparable Vball EF. I did however like the older cap design.

Felipão G said...

It isn't expensive either, I think I paid like $1.35 or $1.50, so not bad. In the end, as you mentioned, a good pen and low-key, nothing fancy, nothing that draws attention too much.

Even on bond paper I noticed that there's much more bleed on this pen than the VBall, but of course, it's 0.7mm vs 0.5mm on the VBall. I did see that the Uni's ink dried faster, probably because of the ink storage method.

I agree with you on the old cap design, however, I like more the translucent plastic detail on the new cap.

Something that's interesting is the fact that Uni-Ball switched to a colored barrel, since in the past they normally used a single color, different colors depending on the top and then the color is indicated on the tip and on the cap, something that was kept in the UB-145/7 and changed for the UB-245/7. Besides that color change and the change in the design of the cap there aren't any changes between the UB-145/7 and the 245/7. I don't know, however, if there are internal changes that can't be seen.

oli said...

the blue ink hue is very pretty.

Anonymous said...

I just got a box of these on Clearance as Staples just discontinued carrying them. I thought it a bit odd that I couldn't feel the ink inside it but now I understand. Not a big fan of this type of ink myself as it seems a lot of it is still left in the pen when it stops writing and seems inefficient. But now I have 12 of them so I'llsee how they work out.