Montblanc

Around 3 years ago, I bought a Meisterstück Solitaire Blue Hour LeGrand Rollerball from Montblanc Sydney. Price was just under $2,000. The pen itself… Read more

is magnificent, but the MB rollerball cartridges are poor. There are frequent micro-interruptions to the ink flow, leaving small gaps in the ink on page. I have come to realise that I never look forward to writing with this pen; in fact I dislike using it. Writing with a pen of this quality and price should be something to savour, but this is the opposite.

I took this issue up with the staff in the first few months and they were very reluctant to accept that there was anything wrong with the cartridges as originally supplied (which themselves are expensive). One would have thought that they’d be falling over themselves to assist, given the price paid for the pen in first place. They also had no idea of guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law. Anyway, I eventually prised one replacement cartridge out of them, and while it was slightly better, it still had the basic problem of micro-interruptions.

Then they told me that cartridges are good for only 6 months. That is an unreasonably short a shelf life – I’d have to be handwriting lengthy letters constantly to use a cartridge within its shelf-life. But this is obviously not a pen one uses to write grocery lists. It is for regular limited use at most, or special occasions. Plus, that was never communicated before purchase. Indeed, they were very happy to take my money when I bought multiple packets of cartridges at the time buying the pen – which on the claimed short shelf-life, I would have had to be undertaking massive amounts of handwriting to get through within their shelf-life. But here’s the thing – the cartridges were never good – none of them, including the replacement – even from the first day.

I would never have invested this much into this pen had I known this before I started. Bitterly disappointing. I would absolutely not recommend any rollerball product from Montblanc.