Fit and finish: 4/5. Construction is top-notch, noticeably better than either of my Parker (Frontier, Sonnet) pens, the latter of which retails for more than twice what the Danitrio sells for. Not sure how long the plastic clippy mechanism in the cap will last. The metal clip on the outside of the cap is a monster though!
Appearance: 2/5. All the materials are high quality, I'm just not as impressed with the styling as I thought I would be. The effect of black on gold with the very simple smooth lines is a bit pretentious, like it's trying to be bling but still looking cheap.
Size and weight: 5/5. I've been looking for a larger, heavier pen and this is it. It's thick, solid, cold and reassuringly metallic. This is clearly an indestructible pen and fits my large hands very well.
Ergonomics: 3/5. Nice metal section but the bit you're obviously meant to hold is a little low for my tastes... this is a big pen for big hands, and big hands need to hold further from the nib or suffer a steep writing angle (70 degrees). It writes fine when held at the obvious place, but feels better when held at a position slightly higher on the section (45 degrees held from just in front of the gold ring). Perhaps a symptom of these being NOS rollerball conversions, designed for a steep writing angle.
Nib performance: 4/5. It wrote straight out of the box, putting down a uniform medium line of about the right width. It's a little too dry with Noodler Black... but then compare it with my Sonnet that outright fails to write with that ink much of the time. No skipping at all, just the line gets quite faint. Load it up with Luxury Blue and we get a perfectly satisfying wet line without any excess ink on the page, which the Sonnet suffers from. The pen has very uniform metering of ink onto the page, quite independent of the ink's viscosity and flow characteristics.
My only problem with the nib is that it feels like it has a fair amount of drag resistance across the page, almost as if it wasn't lubricated by ink even though it's laying the stuff down beautifully. It's not scratchiness or toothiness, the motion is quite smooth, there's just resistance to motion. I guess that will go away to some extent once I've used it for a while and smoothed the nib out a bit.
Filling: converter included. It's a fairly cheap-looking plastic affair but does the job. If it dies, I'm sure it'll be compatible with the standard international ones and readily replaceable.
Value for money: 5/5. Not the prettiest pen and definitely not a fashion statement, this is a basic and very very functional pen for not very much money. Better writing quality than things costing twice as much. Indestructible. Did I mention cheap for a new modern pen?
Some writing examples; apologies for the handwriting and waffle, it was 2am when I did it. Not that my usual is much better
I must also apologise for the softness of the images, I didn't have my good camera here and had to use a tiny aperture to get the brightness down on minimum flash power.
And a size comparison, uncapped. Front to back: Pelikan M400, Frontier Flighter, $33 pen (note the diameter!).
