I have actually been on a quest to find the best quality pens lately. Takes deep breath.
I started with BIC four-colours and they were great for a while (circa year 10 and 11), very convenient and rarely smudging, but they're a little chunky and they crack quite frequently, which IMO makes them not worth the price.
I stuck with kilometricos for most of my VCE, as the variety of colours was great and I was able to satisfy my OCD stay organised by having black for the majority of my writing and a special colour for subheadings, correcting and ruling pages for each subject (purple for spesh, green for methods, blue for physics etc) which also happened to match with my note books. I was one colour-happy student, and everything was nice and uniform.
kilometricos are cheap and available in bulk, but I burn through them so fast and they go smudgy a lot of the time which both ruins my work and also shortens their ink-span. (side note, has anyone tested if they actually write for a kilometer? if so I'm like a marathon-writer by now)
Sick of running out of pens while on campus, I scanned the DAISO japanese $2.80 shop in QV (EVERY ITEM IS $2.80) and bought a pack of 10 pens I thought would last, but at 28c each they didn't even last one lecture and I don't even take notes in lectures. The two I tested only marked the page with ink about 60% of the time so my writing was half-invisible, and they also both literally fell apart in my hands while I was trying to write a sentence with them. Not only that, but they had that stupid clicky mechanism where you have to push a little plastic tab to pop them back into the retracted position. That snappy, plasticy sound they made just sounded so so cheap, and it hurt my ears and my pride.
Determined to redeem the name of cheap pens, I ordered two black pens from eBay that had a soft rubber back which was compatible with my touch screen. I thought "hey, pens that can also be used as a phone stylus are totally worth like one dollar each".
I was wrong. The touch screen compatibility was nice but the pen-side didn't last. They were twist-to-retract and after a few days of use that mechanism was broken and the tip wouldn't even show itself when you screwed the top. Eventually, the rubber stylus base fell off as well. Not to mention the pocket-clip things snapping within the first few classes of use.
As it stands, I'm using kilometricos and some okay black ball points my mum got in bulk for her business, but they're a little scratchy and I've run out of colourful kilometricos so my work is all black and it drains the life out of me when I work. I've nearly lost all drive to continue with my education and if I don't find a fantastic, aesthetically pleasing staple pen soon I think I'll drop out of uni and become a software engineer.
There is hope, however. My Algorithms lecturer showed us his four-colour pen which has green, blue, red and yellow and was made by google! I emailed him about its origins and he said it was a gift or attending a google conference. I'll be on the lookout for these conferences and stuff like hackathons in the future. I'm also going to Japan in January, and I know that if good, solid, colourful and practical pens exist somewhere, they will be sold in Japan.
To anyone who says worrying about pens is ridiculous, nerdy, or a waste of time, you are lucky because you clearly have a reduced sensitivity to the finer things in life such as aesthetics, comfort, colour and uniformity.
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