Best Beginner Fountain Pen (2026): A Japanese Fine Is Not a European Fine

Nib widths, and the Japanese-European gap

Nib letters are not a standard. They are each maker's own description, and there is a consistent regional difference.

Japanese nibs — Pilot, Sailor, Platinum — are ground finer, because Japanese writing needs fine strokes to keep small complex characters legible.

European nibs — Lamy, Kaweco, Faber-Castell — run broader at the same letter.

Roughly: a Japanese Fine is close to a European Extra Fine, and a Japanese Medium is close to a European Fine. One step, consistently.

So the ladder on this page crosses that line. The Pilot Metropolitan here is a Japanese Fine, which will lay down a genuinely fine line. The Lamy AL-star is a European Medium, which is noticeably broader and wetter.

Which you want depends on two things. How small you write — fine nibs suit small handwriting and annotations. And what paper you use — a broad wet nib on cheap office paper feathers and bleeds, while a fine nib survives it.

If you want to see shading and sheen in your ink, go broader. If you want a pen for everyday notes, go finer.

Cartridges, converters and how to fill

Three filling systems, and the choice decides whether you can use bottled ink.

Cartridges are sealed plastic tubes you push onto the nib section. Clean, convenient, and you are limited to the colours your pen's maker sells — and to proprietary fittings, since most makers use their own shape. Lamy cartridges do not fit a Pilot.

Converters are refillable cartridges with a piston. They fit the same slot, and they let you use any bottled ink, which is where the range and the interest is. Both the Metropolitan and the AL-star take a converter, and the Metropolitan usually ships with one.

Piston fillers build the mechanism into the barrel. They hold more ink and cannot use cartridges at all.

International standard cartridges fit many European pens, which is worth knowing because it opens up third-party inks. Pilot and most Japanese makers use proprietary sizes.

Almost everyone starts on cartridges and moves to a converter within a few months, because bottled ink is cheaper per millilitre and comes in hundreds of colours rather than four.

Looking after it, which is mostly flushing

Fountain pens are simple machines and they fail in one way: dried ink in the feed.

Flush when you change ink, and every month or two regardless. Run cool water through the section until it comes out clear, then leave it nib-down on kitchen paper to dry. Never hot water, which can loosen adhesives and craze plastic.

A stubborn pen benefits from soaking the nib section overnight in cool water with a drop of washing-up liquid.

Store it nib-up if it is going to sit unused for weeks, so ink drains back rather than drying in the feed. For long storage, empty and flush it first.

Cap it every time. An uncapped fountain pen dries out in minutes, and that is the most common reason a pen stops working mid-session.

Do not fly with it full if you can help it, or fly with it completely full rather than half — a partly full barrel has air that expands at altitude and pushes ink out. Cap up, nib up.