Our Thoughts on the Platinum Curidas
We’re trying something new this week here at Penquisition. My father and I each ordered a Platinum Curidas back in January when preorders first opened. We had planned to meet up and check out each other’s colors and compare notes once the pens arrived, but like most plans during these Quarantimes, those plans had to change.
Our pens arrived a couple of weeks ago, and now that we’ve had enough time to get used to them we decided to do a Zoom call to compare notes since meeting up was out of the question. Then we thought it might be fun to record the call and upload it as a part of our review (our good friend Corinne over at Pensplaining has been encouraging us to branch out in to videos, so what better time?) This is our first attempt at this sort of thing, and we hope you like it because we enjoyed doing it.
Now, I personally hate when I click on a review post and all it is is a link to a video with no text about the pen itself. I’m not about to be guilty of doing the same, so here are some additional thoughts on the Platinum Curidas below:
Upon opening the box, the size of the Curidas really made an impression on me. This is not a small pen. Measuring 6” when the nib is retracted, and 5.5” (including nib) when the nib is out, this pen is very substantial. I was honestly surprised to find that it fit in my shirt pocket when I clipped it in; I was expecting it to be too tall. As it is, so much of the pen sticks up above the clip that some people might choose not to wear it this way, which really gets to the core of my impressions of this pen: this is a pen that one needs to hold before you truly know if it’s for you.
The Curidas clipped to my shirt pocket vs. clipped to the shirt of a smaller person.
There are lots of little design trade offs with this pen that really need to be experienced. There is the nub on the back that the nib-sealing mechanism uses when you engage the nib, there are the three spots of raised plastic associated with keeping the clip in place, there is the clip itself. Then there is also the sheer size of the pen, the long knock and the wide barrel. This is a pen that was made to be tried at pen shows and meet-ups, and it’s really unfortunate that it is coming to market at a time when we can’t hand our pens to our friends for them to give them a shot.
None of that is to say that any of those things have to be an issue. In fact, none of them bother me personally (and if you watched the above video, my father actually really likes the rear-nub, which may be the hottest take I’ve heard about this pen so far.) I love this pen. I plan to get another one. The medium nib on my Curidas was perfect out of the box and it’s a joy to write with. The size works perfectly in my hands, and while I keep waffling back and forth on whether to leave the clip or take it off, I honestly write comfortably with the pen either way. For me the pen is great, I just hesitate to declare that it will be same for everyone, knowing that not everyone has my same hands, or grips a pen exactly the same as I do.
I will say, there’s a part of me that wonders if they could have made the pen a little shorter. The length of the knock is what it is because of how far back the nib needs to retract in order to be sealed in, but the “neck” on the nib unit is surprisingly long, and maybe there was room there to shorten things a little and then shorten the barrel equally while keeping the knock the same? Then again, a shorter barrel would make the knock look even longer, so maybe it’s best that the pen itself is oversized the begin with, to keep things in better proportion.
One thing I really appreciate, while we are talking about the mechanism, is that the spring in this pen is accessible. I don’t know how easy it is to source a replacement, but the sheer fact that in theory one could replace just the spring of it wears out, instead of having to replace the whole pen, makes me very happy. I also appreciate the way that the internal pieces latch together to ensure that nothing falls open and starts leaking ink inside of your pen.
It feels wrong to end a review by saying “maybe you’ll like this pen, maybe you won’t.” There are some fair criticisms to be made about the Curidas’ design, about its size and its protrusions. None of those caused any issues for me or my father in using this pen, though. The situation that occurred with the price point of this pen when it first went on sale, where it was initially street priced at $64 and then bumped up to a hard MSRP of $80, that definitely left a sour taste in some mouths. But at $80 it’s still half the street price on a Pilot Vanishing Point (and less than half the MSRP. Yes, if you know where to look you can find a Vanishing Point for closer to $120, but that’s still more expensive than the Curidas, and by the time the Curidas is no long supply constrained who knows how cheap it may end up in those same places. I don’t need a metal barrel, and I definitely don’t need to pay a $100 premium for a tiny gold nib. At this price point, I could definitely see picking up another Curidas or two in the future, which really is the best thing I can say about a pen, that reviewing it makes me want to get another one.
The pens used for this review were purchased through Pen Chalet at the publicly available discounted price that they offered at the time .
