Mont Blanc Roller Ball Refill Package

For a while people have been asking about reviews of Mont Blanc pens.  At this point I still have some hesitance dropping the money required for an actual Mont Blanc pen, although I’ve spent the same on some fountain pens which I just feel are more worth it.  Either way I thought it was time to at least do a review of the Mont Blanc Roller Ball Refills that are standard in their pens.

Mont Blanc Roller Ball Refills and Expiration Dates

One of the first cool things that I noticed about the Mont Blanc Roller Ball Refills was that they actually have an expiration date stamped on the end of the barrel, which I’ve never seen on any refills before.  I’m not sure how I feel about the expiration date because part of me feels like it has the potential to be a ploy to get people to purchase more refills. After giving it a bit of thought though I figured that since my refills purchased about 2 weeks ago had an expiration date that was over 2 years away (August 2014) I feel like its nice to have an idea about how much longer you can reasonably expect your ink to last.  If I had picked these up on a store shelf and saw that the expiration date was only a few months away, at least I’d know enough to try and seek out another package from the shelf.  Also, I’m not sure how necessary the expiration date might be based on the numerous reviews of these refills on Amazon that show that they tend to run out fairly quickly.  Obviously with only about 2 weeks worth of use, I’m unable to comment on the longevity of the refills.  What I can talk about is the writing experience.

Mont Blanc Roller Ball Refill Writing Sample

I found that writing with the Mont Blanc refill matched the experience that I had with some of the better roller ball refills that you can find out there.  The ink flows very smoothly, and the boldness of the black color is exemplary as I did not notice any skipping, splotches, feathering, show through, or white space after doing some writing with the refill installed in an old generic no name pen that it happened to fit in.  The one area of concern that I did have though was when I was testing the dry time of this ink in my Black n Red notebook.

I’d like to do a comparison of the Mont Blanc Roller Ball Refills with some other roller ball refills that our readers think are as good or better, so what are your favorite roller ball refills?  Leave a comment below and we will get our hands on some to do a comparison test.  I’ve got at least one other comparison test in the works that was suggested by a reader in a previous post, so I’d like to try and make it a bit more of a regular feature here to do some head to head comparisons of similar items.

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