Our friends over at Zebra Pen sent over these new Zebra ZMulsion RT 1mm pens in black, blue, and red for a review recently and I've been using them for about a week now so I figured it was time to share my experience with them.
Normally I'd have shared a picture of the pens in their package as well, but I was a little enthusiastic about trying them out when they arrived, so I forgot to photograph them before I tore the package open. I've classified this pen as a ballpoint, but I think with all of the hybrid type pens the line is kind of blurring as these dont really compare to a traditional ballpoint, they are much better than that.
With a nice soft rubber grip, good balance, and a comfortable overall design, the Zebra ZMulsion is definitely a fun and easy pen to write with. Typically the 1mm size tip is not my pen of choice, but obviously a larger tip like this will always write more smoothly than a smaller tip like I usually enjoy using. In the case of these pens, its impressive how smooth they are, its almost TOO smooth actually. Writing with them on the paper in my Black n' Red notebook was almost like writing on ice it felt so smooth. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but just something you need to be aware of and adjust slightly for.
I was mostly impressed with these pens, however if you look at the above writing sample and click on it for the larger view, you will see I've put a few foot notes (look for the * and the 1 next to some of the writing sample) to indicate where I saw some problems. There were a few instances on the writing sample and with my daily use of the pen where there were phantom streaks of ink that appeared and also some splotches that I saw left behind. These elements were slightly annoying but did not show up in what I'd consider an excessive frequency. The dry time with this ink was interesting because although it took about 5 seconds to completely dry, the smudging was very minimal between 1 second and 5 seconds. Usually an ink will smudge a lot in the first second and then progressively get better, but this one was very minimal and consistent for the first few seconds before completely drying which is nice.
I think that the Zebra ZMulsion RT 1mm is a fairly nice writing pen for the money, and its definitely a super smooth writer, but just don't expect perfection from this model. Thanks again to our friends at Zebra Pen for sending these over to review.
