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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised there's a market for budget foutain pens. We mostly don't write by hand anymore and if we do, it's to jolt down notes.

One chooses to use a fountain pen for the thrill of it, or for love of tradition. In those cases, money is no object. A budget fountain pen is like a budget race car.

Obviously I'm wrong, but I'm not sure why.

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I use a cheap-ish fountain pen regularly, and I think in some ways the fact that nobody "needs" a fountain pen (or any pen) much anymore is actually a contributing factor to this, for a few reasons.

1. Status symbols are frequently every-day objects elevated in some way. Montblanc pens were good status symbols to have on your desk when everyone used pens all the time, now they're anachronistic. So the upper end of the market shrinks as the item becomes less necessary.

2. Pens becoming less necessary for daily life makes them more of a hobby, and while people pretty much by definition are spending disposable income on a hobby they probably still have a budget in mind. Also, a lot of hobbies get kind of fuzzy between the hobby itself and collecting-as-a-hobby (is the hobby writing or is the hobby collecting pens?). A lot of people would rather own a small collection of affordable "pretty good" fountain pens with some differences between them instead of one really excellent pen.

3. The usual march of progress means a very good fountain pen can be manufactured for a lot less money than it could a few decades ago. That means businesses can serve that hobbyist market, and satisfy the craving for variety.

Same process that happens with lots of goods. Watches of any description used to be a luxury good, then cheap quartz movements were invented: the luxury market for Rolexes never went away, but a lot more people bought Timexes, and nobody really needs a watch anymore because we have cell phones, but there's still a hobbyist market. Nobody needs a turntable to play LPs anymore, but vinyl is a big hobby for probably a lot of the same nostalgia/"physical is good" reasons pens are a hobby, and you can get a very good sounding turntable today for a lot less money than you could 40 years ago.

The nature of the pen makes writing not hurt your hand. More precisely, it reawakens a painless way to write that was put off-limits by ballpoint pens. That is, write in mostly cursive, direct the tip across the paper and never press down.

Gel pens also support this, if you have a heavy pen body.

Luxury fountain pens rarely provide a better writing experience than a budget one. Montblancs had a reputation (don't know about the present) for fragile pens that wrote like every other fountain pen. You're paying for the white blob in the cap. Many luxury pens use very similar nibs as the cheaper pens, just adorned with gold and engraving that doesn't add to the writing experience.

If you want tradition, you can buy vintage pens - they work great. The Parker 51 is usually claimed to be the epitome of fountain pens. They aren't luxury in any way - they don't even look like fountain pens, but they just write and write. Vintage Esterbrook pens have replaceable nib options that put any modern pen to shame.

> Obviously I'm wrong, but I'm not sure why.

I bought a budget fountain pen as an experiment - can I reduce waste and potentially save money? It has been a complete success, with the side effect that writing has become much more enjoyable. I ended up getting my kids the Pilot Kakuno - they have also found writing to be more enjoyable and their penmanship has improved dramatically as a result.

Expensive pens don't have any allure to me. I'm sure they're nice, and many of them write better than a budget pen, but... I wouldn't turn one down as a gift, but I'm not interested at all in buying one.

Budget fountain pens fill a niche of “spend a little more for something nice, but not so much I’ll worry about losing or wrecking it.”

Fountain pens that work well without fuss, like Lamy Safari, or Pilot Metropolitan, really are nicer to use than ballpoint or gel pens, and the slight extra effort to using ink in cartridges or from a bottle adds familiarity and comfort to it. It’s not a pen, it’s your pen, and the longer you have it, the more attached you are to it. The more attached you are to it, the better the act of using it feels. It makes your world feel less disposable.

I use fountain pens and take notes at work with fountain pens. But not budget ones -- not luxury ones either, but in the range of €100-150. Part of the pleasure is the nib, sure, but also the body and the metal cap and the weight. I doubt I would derive the same enjoyment from a Lamy Safari but I must admit I never tried it.

You wouldn't, the Safari is too light and plasticky feeling. But the Pilot Metropolitan has a metal body that gives it a comparable heft to more expensive pens, and writes beautifully.

You might look at TWSBI fountain pens. They're still cheaper than your normal range, but very good quality, and offer some of the more fun mechanisms, like the pump pistons that fill the body itself with ink--in a clear body, it looks cool.

Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens are ridiculously good for their price, and if you leave one out on your desk and someone comes along and damages the nib trying to write with it, you just throw the whole thing away. On top of that I haven't had one leak and they very rarely dry out or get clogged.

Why is it hard to imagine someone who enjoys writing but can't spend hundreds on a luxury pen?

The performance parts of a pen are the nib, ink, and hand feel. All of which are cheap to make to a high standard unlike a race car with hundreds of parts made with extreme precision.

The flashy bits of an expensive fountain pen are just there to attract people. Rare wood, expensive metal accents, exclusive brand names don't do anything to add to the writing experience as a whole. Sure they make you feel good cause your in an exclusive club, and that is something, but that doesn't effect the way it writes.

I switched to a fountain pen because I heard that they required less effort to write with, and the amount of writing I was doing for my studies was starting to cause RSI issues in my hand. In that context, as a student, finding a budget-friendly pen was a concern.

When I was in school in the UK, we were only allowed to write with fountain pens. My guess is that learning to handwrite properly is easier with them; I certainly write much more legibly with one today (now I'm 40).

There is value in jotting down notes legibly :)

Anecdotally, my 10 year old nephew asked for one for Christmas this year. When we asked why he wanted one, he replied “to write stuff.”

Not sure but I wonder if there is some hipster youth trend where writing is making a comeback?

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