I don’t know where I’ve been but these “new” Uniball Air Rollerball pens (via Amazon) say new on the package but according to Amazon have been around since May of this year. They looked and sounded pretty cool so I figured I needed to get on a review of them ASAP.
The Uniball Air rollerball pen has a pretty nice design with some of it being subtle and other parts of it being a little more dramatic. Personally I really like the drastic curving arches that make up the design on the grip and that blends from the clip into the top of the cap. Each of these make parts of the pen also color coordinate with the ink inside the pens. There is also a color coordinated translucent band at the top of the grip as well as a little translucent cap on the topside of the barrel.
This picture of the Uniball Air rollerball shows off the cool black on dark grey maze like pattern on the body of these pens. Admittedly I had to play around with the camera settings to get the pattern to pop like this so in “real life” you wont see the pattern as vibrantly. The real life look of the pattern with the two dark colors like this gives the pen body an almost textured look to it, which I thought was the case when I first saw these, but when I opened the package I was a little disappointed to see that it was just the graphic design and not a true texture.
The up close of the tips on these Uniball Air rollerball pens show that they have a pretty unique textured but flat black cone on them. I tried to get the closeup of the tips just because I was curious what they looked like compared to other pens since the writing experience with these is SO smooth, but I’ll touch on that next. You can also see the grips pretty clearly here, other than the swooping design of the arc color accent there is nothing very compelling about the grips. They are sort of a smooth hard plastic, and I’d prefer they had some sort of rubber coating, but I overall they are still comfortable and serve their purpose.
From a functionality standpoint you can see that inside the grip section of the Uniball Air rollerball it works off a standard feed like you see in many similar pens. Again this picture is a little bit enhanced and had a lot of light pumped through it when I was taking it to highlight this, you won’t really see this when you are using the pens in a normal situation.
Uniball Air Rollerball Writing Sample
The Uniball Air rollerball has a pretty exceptional feel when writing with it. Its one of the smoothest feeling pens I’ve written with in a while. As compared to regular rollerball pens when you can feel even just a hair of friction and even feel the vibrations of the ball rolling, that somehow seems to have been eliminated from the writing experience with this pen. Its odd at first to write with a rollerball pen and feel absolutely no feedback but within a few seconds there is a realization that its pretty awesome. The feel is almost like that of a felt tip pen or a porous point pen like the Sharpie Pen but minus ANY of the friction that the fibers of felt would cause moving across the paper. Its like a smooth sweeping feeling as you drag the pen across paper.
The ink itself lays down an incredibly smooth, consistent, and bold line. I found that the dry time was a little slower than expected on this paper which was in an Clairefontaine notebook. The Uniball Air contains Uni Super ink which you will find in many other Uniball pens which means that the ink binds to the paper, and resists being removed by water, resists fading, and resists many common fraudulent techniques aimed at altering ink. The other interesting thing about the Uniball Air rollerball is that it writes at any angle, so I tested that with the most extreme angle of all, which is upside down. The pictures above show the normal writing experience on the left and an upside down writing experience on the right. The most important thing to note about the upside down writing experience is that its really tiring, surprisingly tiring to be honest…or maybe I’m just super weak and out of shape. But seriously it was impressive to see that even completely upside down the pen kept writing although with a lighter and not as bold line. Even beyond the writing sample above I was scribbling on a sheet of paper completely upside down and the pen just wouldn’t give up.
The Uniball Air rollerball (via Amazon) definitely provides one of the smoothest writing experiences I’ve ever felt. Besides writing great, they also just look pretty cool and different from a lot of the offerings I’ve seen lately, so I’d highly recommend giving them a try to see how you feel about them.
©2017, Brian Greene. All rights reserved.
