Rotring 600 Ballpoint Pen

Make no mistake with pen tiers: Zebra F701 is the undisputed best pen. The price point, the quality, the default ink, everything. It's an incredible pen.

For ~4x the cost, you can get the Rotring 600 ballpoint pen. It's another phenomenal pen that shares many of the same qualities that make the F701 so great.

The Rotoring has some good heft to it with the metallic body, it's got a gnarled grip so it's actually easy to hold (unlike the Parker Jotter Ballpoint Pen which is the idea of pen). And the click of the button is excellent, superior even to the Zebra family. The colorways of the Rotoring family are also excellent and the default 1.0 ink is a bit thicker but also smoother.

The 600 has become my desk's daily driver given all this and a decision to lean into the $36 luxury since I deserve it. It sits on top of the Panobook and they're excellent together.

If you're a writer who likes to jot and scribble and diagram and whatnot, I strongly recommend this or the Zebra family. I know little to nothing about the writing implements best for drawing, however.

The Rotring family is known for mechanical pencils. And I do have a separate 3-in-1 Rotring 600 which is black pen, red pen, and mechanical pencil.

Theoretically 3-in-1 is the best of all worlds. However:

• a) having an at your fingertips red pen for secondary markup when scribbling schematical notes is fantastic, and
• b) the black pen sacrifices some quality vs. the 1-in-1 ballpoint only, and
• c) including a mechanical pencil without an attached eraser undermines the whole thing

It feels antithetical to the pen’s 3-in-1 convenient, premium design to sacrifice so much pen quality via ink inferiority and so much versatility via lack of eraser.

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