I want to explore your pencils in India.

Kindly let me know , whom to contact.

Warm Regards

Swwpak jain

Just curious if others have had a similar experience? Will probably try these again, but the warp and apparent crookedness of the ferrule is really a deal-breaker.

You are right – graphite does not flow out of a pencil the way ink may flow out of non-ballpoint pens. Yet the meeting of pencil point and paper remains a very satisfying experience for many.

And for the record, the number of non-spam comments that haven’t been approved here is exceedingly few, probably under one per year, – and questioning the merits of pencils vs. pens is perfectly welcome.

I’ve played around a bit more with pencils and have not taken out my pens in the last few days. I think this has made me quite a bit more sensitive to the differences between pencils…and has helped me better understand some of what people have discussed with regard to writing performance.

There are no doubt many people like me who frequently use fine pens that require virtually no effort to write and provide pretty much no tactile feedback or sound. Pencils are quite a different experience, and for a person who hasn’t handled a pencil much in years, it’s easy to clump all pencils into the same group because the writing characteristics are fundamentally different. If you’re particularly sensitive to one experience, the other will seem generic, regardless of the variations within that category.

When I started jumping into the pencil thing, I had unrealistic expectations, partially due to reading reviews, such as comparing a Palomino to a gel pen in one review, and describing the CDT Item 17 as “butter on glass”. With pens, I could understand such analogies, and I incorrectly carried my expectations to wood-cased pencils. The two write in fundamentally different ways, requiring different amounts of friction/pressure, and producing different sounds/vibrations (feedback) that also influence the subjective impression of “smoothness”. A smooth pen and a smooth pencil aren’t the same kind of smooth, but both can be appreciated.

So for those people who stumble across the blog and see my initial confused comment…hopefully I’ve cleared it up a bit.

From my own goofing around and subjective tests of writing (darkness and smoothness), I too found the Item 17 a real winner for an HB. A 2B Palomino was a real pleasure to use and super-dark, but I fear it’s too soft to hold a fine enough point for my Chinese writing. I don’t have any 2B or B Hi-Unis to compare unfortunately…and I was surprised how light the Staedtler HB was compared to the Japanese pencils (the 2B seemed on-par with the other HBs)

A small 750px-wide snapshot of a quick comparison of a few random pencils is at http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s274/Tierdaen/pencilcomparison750.jpg

Thanks for providing a great blog, and thanks for not wiping away my impression comments. Perhaps someone will find them helpful. :)

I was about to write a lengthy defence of the pencil, but I realized that with hundreds of years of use and development, the writing implement that Forbes ranked as the fourth most important tool of all time hardly needs a defence or reality check.

I would never claim a pencil is perfect for all writing or marking uses. But “smoothness”? Surely it depends on your needs and your exact definition of this term (and can we even measure this quality without advanced scientific equipment?). Try quickly drawing a large radius circle on a canvas sized piece of toothy paper – the 0.5mm mechanical pencil and the gel pen won’t cut it.

Now I’ve said a number of good things about Pentel’s mechanical pencil leads here in the past. Their 1.3mm polymer lead may be one of the the closest bridges between the woodcase and mechanical pencil experiences.

Incidentally – you are comparing the CDT HB pencil with a two degree different Pentel 2B 0.5mm mechanical pencil lead. I think using a Mitsubishi Hi-Uni in 2B or the HB Pentel lead would be a fairer comparison.

Yet for the life of me, I can’t escape the feel of scratching against the paper, which feels amplified by sound and vibration of the wood. I’ve got a Maruman Mnemosyne, some Rhodia pads, some Clairefontaine pads, some Apica notebooks, and some scratch copier paper, but no matter what I’m writing on…there’s never a particularly great sense of smoothness with pencils (unlike pens). The differences between pencils (I’ve got some cheap Chinese “Liberty” brand ones, Staedtler Ergosofts, and Uni-Stars with more on the way) are so minor on smooth paper, and the effort required to lay down a particularly dark line is quite high, even for my smoothest (0.5mm 2B Pentel Hi-Polymer lead). I suppose that should be expected for pencils, but I really hoped otherwise.

Trying to justify the emotional attachment to the simplicity of a wooden pencil for writing tasks may not be as easy as pencil reviews made me hope. Especially since I write rather small and a really soft lead won’t hold a point very long (a 20-stroke Chinese character in a 5×5 square just looks like a gray smudge if the point isn’t fine enough).

I’m not poo-pooing pencils at all…but certainly I’m not the only person that *wants* to convert to wooden pencils for emotional reasons (simplicity/purity, what-have you), but has found some discouraging snags. Could very well be my fault or my inability to detect the extremely minute differences in friction between pencils (excepting a slightly different pitch of the scuffing noise). Or perhaps my expectations of how a “high-end” wood-cased pencil can perform in writing were unreasonably high from reading reviews. Perhaps there’s a secret to technique that I’m not aware of.

Whatever it is, I still want to give the pencil a shot…but I thought it would be good to post a sort of a “reality check” amidst these reviews, for they can really raise expectations of pencil performance. If any of the experts have advice on how to remedy or avoid these issues…that could be most useful to a silent bunch of people who hope to convert to pencils like I’m trying to.