Pen Review: Waterman Hémisphère Deluxe Metal

The first fountain pen I bought using my own money was a Waterman Hèmisphère Deluxe Metal in December 2014. At that point I was mainly using Parker Sonnet ballpoint pens and thus, fearing too much of a difference in the writing experience, opted for a rather slim pen. My two Sonnets had metal barrels as well, so I thought this would be a fitting choice.

I purchased the pen from a dealer on the Amazon.de marketplace for 61 EUR and is still available at similar prices. I think it came with a converter, but I might be mistaken. It did not come in a nice box, but your mileage may vary.
The barrel is made of  highly reflective steel (according to Waterman's website palladium plated), which unfortunately caused me a lot of trouble trying to take pictures of it. It also does not help that I neither have a tripod, nor a macro lens. The metal features wavy lines both on the barrel and the clip as can be seen on the pictures. I have not seen this on any other pens and it is matter of taste if you like it or not. I personally like it, of course, but I can see how this could be off-putting.

What I like less, is the rather weird finial at the top of the cap. While the barrel has a rather bland metal disk at its end which is cleanly polished without any imprints, the cap finial disk is cut in a steep angle, as can be clearly seen in the picture above. It was not as noticable in the marketing pictures I saw before purchasing, so I was unpleasantly surprised about this even though I came to peace with it eventually. This is a general design element of the Hémisphères while the wavy lines on barrel and cap only seem to exist on this version of it.

The clip is in the usual split Waterman design. It is not spring-loaded but still nicely flexible. The cap is not threaded but clicks on to the barrel. Clicking the cap on to the barrel produces an audible and satisfying noise and feedback, much, much nicer than with my Parker Sonnet and Parker IM (both of which are just terrible in this regard). The fit is tight, I never had any issues of ink drying up in the pen, even when not using it for weeks at a time, although I have not tested this with any pigmented inks more prone to clogging up the section.

The section it has in common with other variations of the pen. It is made of reflective black plastic. As to be expected with such a thin pen, it might not be very comfortable to hold for prolonged writing session, depending on the size of your hands and your personal preferences. Due to the clip-on cap there are no problems with sharp threads on this pen.

The nib is small, as to be expected for such a compact pen, but not ridiculously so. It is only slightly smaller than the Parker Sonnet's nib. It is made of steel and I did not have any problems with it whatsoever. It wrote straight out-of-the-box, which unfortunately is not a given with pens in this price class. It is neither particularly wet, nor very dry. There is virtually not flex to it and the tip shape seems very spherically. Hence there is no line variation to speak of. All in all a solid performer and a great nib to get started with, but nothing really exciting.

So far I did not take apart the pen and investigated the feed, but I would not expect anything surprising there. It does its job well but then at the same time I have not really challenged it as the nib is not particularly flexy or wet. The only noticable thing about the feed is that it is rather thick. The nib tines are wrapped around it but only cover half of its thickness. It doesn't look great, but to be honest I only noted it when taking the pictures for this review.

The writing example again shows the lack of line variation. Even after not having used the pen for more than a week it wrote the example text without any skipping or hard starts. The ink I mainly used in this pen, also in the writing sample, is Waterman Serenity Blue.

The main feature of this pen for me is how thin it is. It is the only pen I have that fits into the pen loop of a "personal" size Filofax organizer. This feature is what kept the pen in the circulation for me. If you need a pen for a small organizer/pen loop or you just happen to like thin metal pens, the Hemisphere is for you. For any other need there are probably better options to be found. For instance, even though I find the classical design rather boring, just for the writing characteristics I rather prefer the Pelikan M200 (separate review coming up) which is in the same price range and also a small pen with non-flexible nib.

From left to right: Waterman Hémisphère, Parker Sonnet, Parker IM, Pelikan M200

Yet another Pen Review Page

The main objective of this blog will be to collect my thoughts on the fountain pens I own. Yet another pen review page is probably not needed, but then again, for some of the pens I own I couldn't find any reviews or even proper pictures online before buying them.
In the area I live in there is no proper pen shop, so I had to buy almost all of my pens online, with varying degree of success...

I only very recently started spending way too much money on pens, so it might also be interesting to track the way into this addiction for people to recognize the first signs of this bad habit.

After the usual early Pelikan Pelikano experience at school I stopped caring about pens for a long time. At university I did not really attend any classes, so no need to write down any notes either. When writing my thesis I started getting interested in typography. At some point, trying to escape working on the actual contents, I even at some point made it an option to typeset the document in Fraktur (German blackletter typeface). While doing my research in this area I learned about the older German forms of handwriting such as Sütterlin and Kurrent, but while finding it entertaining not to be able to read less than a hundred years old letters in my native language, I never bothered actually learning to read it. Also writing in it would have required having a fountain pen due to the required line variation.

Only a year or two after finishing the thesis I really started getting interested in handwriting. At that point, roughly a year ago, a weird colleague of mine occasionally started asking questions about notes he read on my notepad that was stowed away in my personal drawer. So far I had mainly used a Parker Sonnet ballpoint pen on extremely cheap college blocks provided by my employer.  This terrible writing experience together with the mild invasion of my privacy sparked the idea to switch back to a fountain pen and at the same time start writing in Sütterlin so other people would not be able to easily read my notes. Also part of the idea was to make taking meeting minutes more fun, of course.

In the future posts I will chronologically go through the list of fountain pens and occasional dip nib I purchased since then. I will explain the intentions behind the purchases (if more than just the good looks of  the pen) and the experience using the pens. Also I will add some pictures of them and probably will also provide some writing samples, probably mostly in the weird style of Kurrent I currently use to write in.