Why would they even…

There is something about certain pens that seems to attract the eye. Be it the iconic simplicity of the LAMY Safari or the distinct black knob and grip of the Pelikan Souverän M series. And where there is attraction, there almost certainly is someone trying to get a share of the money by imitating the key features.

Sometimes I browse Chinese wholesale sites for fountain pens because there are some pretty great deals to be had. Some pens by Moonman or Jinhao for example can provide a high value for money and most of them are original and simple designs that have character of their own.

Other manufacturers apparently just try selling fakes or imitations of popular and recognizable designs. A design I wouldn’t have expected to be imitated though is the PILOT Prera. It is definitely unique and nice to look at, but it also consists of many pieces: Metal rings, finials, end caps and a complex cap assembly. To me, the PILOT CON-40 converter also makes a good part of the appeal. It is in itself a special design, with a transparent twist knob and very little metal. Overall, I would have guessed that reproducing the design of this roughly US$50 next-level pen was too expensive to get right. Apparently I was wrong, as I will show in this post.

But is buying this fake even worth it? The Prera Iro-Ai is a snap-cap pocket pen and a step up from the cheap smiling PILOT Kakuno for about US$10 and the more serious Explorer or Metropolitan for roughly US$25. While using very similar nibs, feeds and cartridges, the look and feel of the Prera is wonderful. The transparent Iro-Ai series provides a playful rainbow of diversity, while the standard models feature a more classy and serious look.
With these four pens to choose from and taking the Varsity disposable (but refillable) cheap option into account, PILOT covers the ground from US$3 to US$50 pretty well, providing affordable options for school, everyday use and business.

So: Is it really worth it to go for a fake? In my opinion: no. But I will elaborate.

Looking at the pens

Clocking in at barely US$3.50, this fake gets nearly everything right about the optics of the Prera. I would argue that whoever designed this knock-off misunderstood what the Prera is: A thin and light pocket pen that can rise to the occasion. I am pretty certain that this fake can do none of these things. Unposted, the original Prera is one of the lightest pens I have ever used, and I do not even need to post it. That is a narrow road to travel, and PILOT has done it beautifully. However, the fake is not even close to a pocket pen.

I am surprised that two of the measurements find counterparts in the other table, and I wonder if someone got their measurements mixed up while writing them down and accidentally designed a larger pen.

The fake being slightly wider, heavier and noticeably longer – it is still obviously imitating the Prera. To give it credit though, the fake does in no way say PILOT or Prera anywhere (other than the original) so it may all be in my head. I have no idea who manufactured it anyway; it came in a thin transparent plastic sleeve, it was sold by the “JINGHAO (sic!) official store” and I am sure they are not the ones who built it. And while the page markets it as a Wing Sung pen, I am sure it isn’t.

They seem to really go for the Prera’s key features, though. Rather than explaining what I mean, look at these pictures:

Pointing out similarities in the barrel section:

• Clear-tinted plastic finials
• Steel ring on the finial
• Slightly tapered shape of the barrel
• More tapered shape of the coloured finial
• Visible spiral of the CON-40 twist mechanism

And some more in the grip section:

• Nib tucked into the grip section
• Feed ends within the grip section
• All the metal rings are there (front and near the threads)
• Ink pools in the front of the grip section

Similarities near the nib:

• Classic funnel shape bend on the nib
• Breather hole in the nib
• Metal ring protrudes as a cap sealing mechanism

What I find interesting is the superficial care that went into designing the converter. Look at some pictures of the CON-40 and the shipped fake converter:

Both converters use an ink agitator. The real CON-40 uses three small ball bearings and a steel insert to keep them inside, while the fake uses a spring. Both converters have a visible thread in the back that looks interesting. Most of the thread on the CON-40 is inside the ink barrel, while most of the fake’s thread is in the significantly longer twist knob. Also, the CON-40 uses the PILOT standard ink cartridge interface, while the fake’s interface looks more like a standard international converters’ interface. Sadly but unsurprisingly at this point, after testing it on a standard international pen, it turns out that it is incompatible.

While this picture of the grip section end ring barely shows it, the original is thinner, more elegant and fits well. The fake one is bent a little, thick and not finished well. It also isn’t put on straight, which – once I noticed – made it quite hard to ignore. The overall profile of both pens is very similar, though, and I wonder if the nibs would be interchangeable. A difference best shown in the view above is that the fake one has a transparent feed, while the Prera has not. I like to see transparent feeds because they enable me to look a little deeper into a pen’s inner workings – and if this pen worked well, it would be delightful. More on that later, though.

Most differences are in the cap. The clip of the original has a different shape and there is a hole in the fake one’s, too. The metal finial of both has the same markings – an indented ring – while the fake one has a logo laser-engraved. The original is marked with a tacky and stylized ‘PRERA’ (on the Iro-Ai at least) while the fake one gives no indication of what it is and flaunts a shoddy glue job joining the metal and the plastic in this location. The sealing cap insert on the original is milky white and hides the nib when inserted, while the fake one is transparent.

We can safely assume that there is clear intention to trick passers-by into thinking of the popular Prera when looking at this facsimile. Still, I would say there are enough obvious differences to tell them apart, if you have ever seen the original up close.

Using the pens

When I get a new pen, I usually dip-test it with a common blue ink (in this case Pelikan 4001 royal blue), but the fake one would not let me. I would dip it into the ink, and it would draw a lot of ink into the feed, but leave none in the nib to be used. I have seen this before when testing pens, and I guess it is caused by misalignment of the capillary forces between nib and feed. The feed would draw the ink back from the nib and would only allow the nib to wet when fully saturated: So I did just that and inked the pen up.

Even then, the pen wouldn’t start easily and needed some pressure on the nib (which is a terrible sign). The tines were touching nearly all the way back to the breather hole. And even when I got the pen to start, it would hardly put enough ink down to leave marks on the paper.

As seen in the close-ups of the nibs in the previous section, the fake EF nib has significantly more tipping material than the Kakuno F nib I use on the Prera. It is unable to provide a steady flow of ink to the tip of the nib, though, so the writing experience is terribly dry. Without the help of ink to wet the surface, the nib feels scratchy and misaligned, even if it seems like it is not. After all this, the original Prera is a blessing to use.

A side-by-side comparison of the two nibs shows the differences in shape and size of the tipping material as well as the ink channel. It seems that there is plenty of ink between the tines. I am not really qualified to say what or if anything is wrong with this picture, but maybe you are. All I can see is that while the PILOT nib was cut dead-centre, the fake’s cut missed the centre and the tipping material is asymmetrical. Maybe this is the problem. When looking at the following pictures, please keep in mind that the original PILOT Kakuno nib came with a pen that costs about the same as a low-end LAMY Z50 replacement nib.

Another nice feature of the Prera is the softness of the snap-cap. I love how premium and satisfying the cap slides on the grip, softly snapping in place and – equally softly – coming off if you pull at it lightly. While the knock-off tries to emulate this, it feels like a trip to the fun fair and there is only a lonely seesaw. After the cap is slid on, it still wiggles around, requires a considerable amount of force to come off again and – equally – to slide back on.

And while the top finial and clip are nearly the same size and shape as the original, the fake one’s clip has sharp edges, catches because it lacks a proper fold-in at the bottom and is far too stiff for me to use on anything I prefer not to cut up. It’s a proper letter opener, if anything.

Wrapping up

It might sound harsh, but: This pen will not stay in my collection as it is. I regret the use of energy, materials and time it took people to get it here, but it is not worth it. It was not worth it to begin with. Anyway, I am giving an appreciative wave to the people who took the time to find some of the most iconic traits of the Prera and re-implement them in this thing. It is not a useful pen, sadly. It misses the point: The Prera is a remarkable pocket-sized pen (yes, it is on the larger end of the pocket pen spectrum, but it is there, I would argue). The Prera is unique in many ways and would deserve a blog post on its own. Still, I think that it is a tad too expensive, being just a pocket-sized Metropolitan with a better cap and smaller body. None of these features are present in this unusable knock-off, however cheap it may be.

The saddest part is, that while this knock-off gets most of the looks right, it gets all the function wrong. An imbalance in the ink transport, a horrible nib that could serve as a scalpel, a cap that doesn’t seal properly and – worst of all – an inking solution that is only similar to standard international cartridges and converters. If you lose the converter, the pen is useless. But after having tried writing with it, I am pretty sure you don’t have to lose the converter for that.

I have seen many of these imitations because I can’t help myself and just want to see how bad they are, and I have come to the following conclusion: Most affordable Chinese pens are OK, as long as they are not trying to be another pen. If it looks like a PILOT Prera or a LAMY Safari but isn’t, it is probably not worth your money. Today we have seen a brilliant example of the latter.

One last chance?

Something I might try after closer inspection is possibly fitting a spare PILOT ‘EF’ nib onto the fake. If the nib really is the problem, it might be a usable pen. I don’t know if it is really worth it, though: Even if it was working well, many issues with build quality and usability remain. I can’t quite bring myself to throw it away yet. Someone built it, after all.

And that is what gets me every time: There is a lot of work involved in building a pen – even when imitating established designs. Some parts of a pen are not easily copied and require some thought and engineering nonetheless: Cutting, finishing and tipping a nib, building a feed that provides good flow, interfacing a cartridge in a way that is safe for transport, making a proper seal when the pen is capped. And all these things are hard to get right. Heck, even established manufacturers get it wrong sometimes in much more expensive pens. This pen – sadly – gets none of these right and all of it wrong in an exceptionally frustrating way. And I can’t decide why someone took the time to build it at all.

If it was created to fraudulently trick people into thinking they got the original: Congratulations, you have done a terrible job. If it was designed to give people a cheap option that looks quite similar to the real deal: someone missed the most important features of the Prera design: slim, small, lightweight reliability that is fun and easy to use.

The last point I want to make – and I hinted at it earlier: The Prera isn’t even that popular. It is one of these odd pen designs that sit somewhere in between the reasonable and the luxury choice. I hardly see them in fountain pen shops and stores. In fact, I have never seen one up for sale on a shelf around here – even in shops that sell most other PILOT pens in the price bracket I mentioned before. In addition to that, it is an unusual design, too. Many pocket pens forgo some traits of larger pens (LAMY dialog CC) or add something new (TRC brass FP). The Prera is mainly a miniaturization of a larger luxury pen (for the standard line) in a clown costume (hello Iro-Ai series!). Considering all that, it is an odd choice for a copy.

Additional Information

Non-affiliate link for the Fake:

• Most parts of the world: Aliexpress (please do yourself a favour and do not buy it)

Non-affiliate links for buying the PILOT Prera:

• In the EU: Stilo e Stile in Italy
• In most other countries: Goulet Pens in the USA