Uni-Ball Signo DX 0.28mm black pen review

About a week ago I was working slowly through my precalculus on my favourite 0.5mm grid paper workbook with my trusty 4-colour BIC pen, when I realized that I was running out of black ink.

I am a bit of a pedant.  I don't think i'm terribly arrogant about it, but I like things to work a particular way and when they don't I find myself worrying about it (unreasonably in most cases).  Now I am a bit concerned about the pens I use to write with; and my quest to find a fine tip is usually fruitless when visiting local stationary shops.

Even fine tipped pens (those that are 0.5mm or lower; my standard 4-colour BIC pen is 1.0mm), tend to bleed all over the page so that you never really get that line you thought you would.  So I took to the web to find a pen that people recommended.  After a fairly quick search I was pushed in the direction of the Uni-Ball Signo DX range by Mitsubishi.  Having had mostly quite positive experiences with ebay I ordered in 10 of the 0.28mm black Uni-Ball pens.

There it is, the pen I have heard so much about.
(I really couldn't of made this shot any more boring)

I nice close up of the pens 0.28mm tip..alright it really isn't
close enough, I need to get myself a decent macro.

My good old trusty 4 colour BIC pen on top, the Sailor Gel
0.38mm middle and the uni-ball

A close up of the pen tips.  You can see how much bigger the
ball-bearing is on on the BIC (it is a 1.0mm after all).

When I tried this pen I was suspicious that I had bought 10 fakes; the tip was a bit rough (that feeling of metal on metal while writing) and the sharpness of the line wasn't what I expected.  The ink did feather (which I learned is when the ink spreads out from the point of contact, thickening the line).  However I did have in my possession a red Sailor Gel 0.38 pen that I had bought in Japan many years ago to compare it against.

Once you have context (as in the red 0.38 sailor pen), I realized that the 0.28mm pen was so much better there really was no comparison.  In addition, as advertised the uni-ball signo dx's have a fairly water resistant ink.  These factors convinced me that it was unlikely that I had received fakes so I decided to move on and hope that the grinding would disappear as I worked with the pen.

The Sailor Gel 0.38 (in red) is top the Uni-ball Signo DX is
bottom.

This close up, both don't look that good, but the Uni-ball is
still much easier to read at this size. 

The grindiness certainly did improve with time, but something quickly came to my attention after using cheap 1.0mm BIC pens for quite some time: Ink life.

Now something you will notice immediately if you observe the pictures (online - unfortunately I don't have a 0.38mm yet!) of both the 0.28mm and 0.38mm pens is the difference in the ink reservoir.  The 0.28mm ink reservoir is noticeably thinner than that of the 0.38mm; "Oh well I thought, it is probably so that the 0.28mm lifespan is on par with the 0.38mm".  Fair enough.

Something review sites wont talk about when they cover this pen is ink life.  On one site, some anecdotal evidence was given suggesting that the 0.28mm would last longer because of it's smaller tip (despite the obviously larger ink reservoir on the 0.38mm).  This could be true (I am getting some 0.38mm versions in), but there really is no way to back this up without actually testing the pen.

So I had used the pen for approximately a day when I thought to myself "hey I wonder how much ink this thing has gone through so far?" (yes really; concerns that arise from the device itself rather than the reality of the devices intended purpose often occur to pedantic people like myself!).  So seeing as I bought 10 of them, I grabbed another from the box and compared it.  It was then that I was unpleasantly surprised enough to find that that over 10mm of ink had disappeared in 1 day.

I have measured the unused ink size of these pens and they come to about 70mm of ink; so 10mm of ink is no small amount.  I then decided to document how much ink I was using per page (I started measuring once I had completed the page I was on):

54.9mm (start)
50.5mm (finished page)
47.0mm (finished page)
44.0mm (finished page)
40.5mm (finished page)

Ouch!, this thing is churning through the ink rapidly.  Obviously on certain pages I used less ink; but I would venture that you would probably get around 15 pages from a brand new pen before the ink runs dry.

This writing book is A4 sized with 5mm grid ruled lines (1J8), so my writing is denser, but I am quite surprised about the ink usage (currently 7 pages has used up 29.5mm (42%) of ink (70-40.5mm) .  At around $2.80 a pen (NZD, I bought 10 for around $28) that is about 19cents/page; considerably more expensive then my Brother HL-5420 which is around 2cents/page.  Granted you can get ink refills cheaper so I might be being a little unfair here.

Yes it's boring maths and some of it may even be wrong, but this is an example of one of the DENSER pages that I have written.  Something like this would use around 4mm of ink on the 0.28mm uni-ball.

The...engine of the pen? I mean it isn't just ink, it has
everything except the case built in

Another point is the grip, another review site noted it, but I will mention it here, because I found that the grip is also too high up (or rather, it does not extend down enough).  I usually find my thumb and fingers in front of the grip, so as far as comfort goes at least for myself, the pen does need a bit of work.

I'm very happy with the lines on this pen; I've never owned a pen as fine as this and the black ink is very dark (even under bright sunlight it does not appear to be gray at all).  But the ink-life I found to be very disappointing and the grip to be a bit uncomfortable.  I'm going to get a few 0.38mm in the next month of different colours, so I will give those a go to see how they compare.

It's hard to say whether to recommend this pen or not.  I'm not happy with the lifespan or the grip, but I find the actual result very nice to look at (it also allows me to fit more in on each page).  I also don't have any other fine tips to compare it to (except the Sailor 0.38 which isn't really that fine because of the feathering).

Well perhaps the question should be: would I use this pen over any other that I currently have? and the answer to that is a definite yes.  Would I purchase them again now knowing how quickly they go through the ink? most likely I would, but I would look into alternatives first.  So I guess overall that is a kind of recommendation..with reservations.

Update October 2015:
After using these pens a while, i've come to the conclusion that I either recieved bad/fake pens via ebay, or the 0.28mm pens have a very high failure rate.  Very few of these pens have actually depleted fully, with some not even 1/2 used before starting to have problems with ink flow.

I can't rule out the possibility of them being fake, but I don't think it is likely.  Perhaps old stock?  In any case the seller shipped a package with 5 free 0.28mm black ink refills at their cost, so perhaps the problem will be solved when I get around to using them.

In any case I still love using these pens, but i'm not sure whether the 0.28mm are worth the trouble.  The 0.38mm Signo DX's have a larger capacity reservoir, although the darker inks (eg black brown) flow far too much, leaving much thicker lines than advertised, while the 0.38mm violet I have tends to draw lines as thinly as the 0.28mm black pen's I have.