this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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The Zebra G-450 is my daily driver. It feels sturdy, the click is satisfying, the ink basically can’t smudge, and it’s inexpensive. The refills are cheap too, and I’ve gone through maybe ten of them (writing lots of stuff in lab notebooks for work).
It doesn’t have that “buy one expensive thing that lasts forever” prestige because it’s not expensive. But I can’t wear this thing out.
I’ve been using the Zebra F-701 for work for a few years now and it’s suffered getting beaten around a lot and taken it extremely well. It’s a fully metal pen, and you can get metal refills too (which I do). In my line of work, all the plastic pens I’ve used have broken, so in my search for an all-metal pen brought me to the 701 and I love it. I got my wife one too for her at work and she also loves it. Great value for money, too.
saw on reddit that people dont like the ink? is this true?
I can’t speak for random Reddit folks but I’ve never been disappointed in the ink and I’ve gone through lots of refills. It doesn’t write as smoothly as my Parker Jotter (which is my at-home pen of choice when I’m not feeling a fountain pen), but the Jotter is twice the price and the refills aren’t all metal (I’m sure you can probably get metal refills third party but I haven’t tried them myself).
Is it a gel pen?
Yep, it uses gel ink.
can you write fast with it, in my experience i am very slow with gel pens
Fast enough for me, I guess. Faster than a ballpoint but not as fast as a rollerball. But a rollerball would turn what I do into an unintelligible smear, so I’m sticking with the gel.