Signo TSI

Dear uni-ball, I give up.

I really tried to liked your erasable Signo TSI pens.

I first got excited about your pens in the mid to late 1990s, when you handed out free eye fine pens outside my Mensa (that’s what they call a university canteen in Germany). I liked them very much and bought more. In fact, I liked writing with them so much that I tried refilling them, so that I could have more colours and a more letters per Deutsch mark spent. Of course that didn’t go well.

When Tesco, a British supermarket chain, had a big uni-ball mixed pen pack I couldn’t resist. Part of this pack were Signo TSI pens. Two of them, green and blue, never worked properly. You get a few millimetres of ink, that’s it. All you can do is use them to carve your message with their sharp rollerball into the paper. It doesn’t matter how hard or light you press, the ink isn’t coming. The other two pens, red and black, work but the coloured lines left on the paper are quite subdued and, to be frank, ugly.

I guess I have to give up and throw them. Trying to get them to work again and again is just frustrating and a waste of time.

You can read more about the Signo Erasable, probably the predecessor of the TSI, in this Pen Addict blog post from 2008.