LAMY 2000 Matte Black Fountain Pen - Medium

If you love fountain pens and contemplating on your first gold nib pen, just get it! I have several fountain pens from different brands - Pilot, Lamy, Twsbi, Diplomat, Faber Castell, Parker, Sheaffer, Cross(all steel nibs) and was fighting the urge to buy a gold nib pen by convincing myself that is just a marketing gimmick, when I got this pen and wrote the first page, everything changed, you may not go back to your other fountain pen with steel nib. My other options were Pilot Custom 74 and Platinum 3776. I got this because of the in built ink mechanism (can hold more ink), the material of the body (Makrolon) and supposedly iconic design (Bauhaus) unchanged for 50+ years and the die-hard fan reviews of this pen. Well I am a fan now.Comfort / Construction - most well balanced pen with cap posted and unposted I have used yet. The material is very nice to touch and grip well when you write - you just know it is designed and built well.Flow - luxurious ink flow (I have medium nib) from start to finish, consistent flow, no skipping. In most pens, when you fill the ink - it is wetter and darker, but start running a bit drier when you write a couple of pages (or less), this pen writes wet consistently till the last drop of ink.Writing - I should say I am able to naturally be more legible and neat in my writing compared to other pens (with no additional effort or attention) May be that’s just with the way how the pen balances in your hand and contacts paper as you write, or may be that’s where the gold nib shines and makes a difference.Ease of Use - Easy to fill ink from bottle with inbuilt piston mechanism so well engineered, easy to clean the hooded nib and pretty low maintenance other wise. If you use ink cartridges, this pen does not support that- it works only with bottled ink. So traveling with this pen can be a challenge as you need to carry / purchase an ink bottle. But if you don’t write as much when you travel, it has good ink capacity that can last pages and a short trip.Looks - Understated, does not draw attention - has that no nonsense look, that just says ‘built for purpose’ and well built at that and ‘ready to go when you are’. If you are looking for a pretty or a colorful pen, this is not one and it absolutely has no qualms. It is functional and at that, it outshines most pens I have used.Any Cons - None for me. Some people talk about a sweet spot, with the medium nib - the sweet spot I believe is pretty large and I don’t have an instance when I was outside the sweet spot range.Price - expensive, but with what other pens retail for, this pen is worth the price. I am thinking of buying another one :)Who is it for (mostly)?1. If you want / like to write with a fountain pen and may be you plan to use only one pen ever- this is probably that pen.2. Fountain pen lovers waiting for your first gold nib pen.

If you ask me, this is the greatest fountain pen mankind ever made, if you consider everything, including price. Some have complained that the nib has a sweet spot. Yes it does, and it is very sweet indeed.

I began using fountain pens after my rheumatologist, chiropractor, orthopedist, and massage therapist all recommended them to ease the burden of extensive writing with arthritic hands with RSIs and carpal tunnel pain. I've been looking for the ultimate "painful hands" pen ever since, and finally found it in the Lamy 2000.There isn't much anyone can add at this point about the design of this pen. It has a permanent spot in the Museum of Modern Art and has accrued a whole collection of awards for its design and engineering. The tolerances of the Makrolon body are so tight the separation between the filler knob and pen body cannot even be felt running a fingernail down the pen feeling for the join. It is meticulously engineered and perfectly produced.This is my second Lamy 2000; I'd had my eye on the limited-edition Black Amber one at Goulet for ages, and when it dropped to nearly half-price I treated myself to one. I tend to write very small, and sometimes in Japanese, which requires an even finer line to remain legible, so I prefer Japanese EF or F nibs and rarely stray from EF nibs when I buy from non-Japanese manufacturers. The EF nib on my Black Amber is astonishingly smooth for its size and nearly comparable to a Japanese EF, unlike every other Lamy pen I have purchased. EF nibs tend to be scratchy simply because they're so very pointy, but the nibs on the Lamy 2000s are quite different from other Lamy nibs and the exceptional nib on the Black Amber put me in the uncomfortable position of wanting to carry a very expensive pen as my EDC.Not wanting to risk loss, damage, or theft of the most expensive pen I'd ever treated myself to, I decided to get a Makrolon 2000 for EDC, and uncharacteristically chose a M nib so I could use it to play with some of my showier shading/sheening inks for EDC. I thought if the EF was that remarkably smooth, the M would be even smoother. And yet still...I. Am. Stunned.The M nib on this Makrolon Lamy 2000 is beyond buttery-smooth, beyond glassy-smooth. I have several glass dip pens, and none of them FLOAT the way this pen does. I collect Parker 51s, famous for their smoothness and effortless writing experience. This pen here blows them away, as much as it grieves me to admit it. My beloved 51s have nothing on this. I honestly cannot tell when I am making contact with the paper, aside from seeing the line appear. There is no feedback whatsoever.The "Makrolon" fiberglass body is so much lighter in comparison to the stainless steel Black Amber that filling it with ink detectably changed the weight of the pen. I find the grip exceptionally comfortable; the taper means that my hand can always find the width it wants on the grip. The brushed texture of the Makrolon is repeated on the stainless grip and it gives effortless traction for the fingers; there is no need at all to squeeze the pen to maintain control. The grip warms quickly and gently in the hand.The net effect of all these qualities -- the feather-light weight, the warmth and friction of the grip, the always-perfect diameter, and the ice-skating glide of the perfectly-tuned, very wet nib -- is that the pen seems to disappear completely in the hand. I feel as though I am waving an empty hand above the paper and the ink magically appears behind it. The overall performance is some Platonic ideal of penhood, the form so in tune with the function that it vanishes completely, leaving only its finished work behind.For anyone who has been told they should switch to fountain pens for medical reasons -- carpal tunnel pain, RSI, arthritis -- this is exactly what the doctor (literally, in my case) prescribed. There is no need to squeeze, no need to apply pressure. Despite all three conditions I just listed, I can write pages at a time with this pen without tiring or feeling pain. This is the most effortless writing experience I have found in over a decade of collecting excellent fountain pens.It is not a pen for everyone. If you prefer a bit of feedback from your nib, you won't find it in the medium nib. If you prefer a bit of flex or line variation, this is not the pen for that. If you want the ease of cartridges, you should note that this pen uses bottled ink exclusively and will never accept a cartridge.If you want a glassy, near-gushing-wet nib that floats across the paper on a buffer of ink and lays down a bold, reliable line, in a pen that feels like nothing at all in the hand, skip my decade of searching and just start here.

This is the best fountain pen on the market. I've tried others. But always come back to this one. It holds an incredible amount of ink and feels amazing to write with.

After quite some time, I finally got around to using this pen. Since so much time passed, I decided to follow along with a YouTube video and clean the insides of the pen out before using it. Upon cleaning out the pen, it quickly became obvious that there was blue ink in the pen at one time. This was sold to me as a brand new pen, but in actuality, what I received was a used one. So, if you do decide to purchase this pen, I would highly suggest double-checking the inside barrel and other parts (when you wipe them down it will be obvious if there was ink in there as you can't hide this) by disassembling the pen and cleaning it out.

I have always wanted one of these. I bought this pen with intentions of being one of my journalling pens, but this pen with a medium nib is too broad for my liking. So I guess this will be my go to signature pen, not good for anything else as far as I am concerned.