Absolutely genius marker design
There is a reason why pilot only sells one whiteboard marker on Amazon. This is, as another reviewer said, the greatest whiteboard marker set created thus far on the Earth. Obviously the star of the show here is the refillable capability, but there are a good number of other fantastic qualities to talk about here: #1: the bullet tip. With the round bullet tip, you can pick this marker up and instantly start to use it, at any angle you want. With a standard chisel tip, you have to grab it, look at it, adjust your grip, use it, realize your holding it wrong, adjust it again, and then get to work. #2: The round body that doesn't roll. The marker is round, which makes it wonderfully comfortable, but it has a tiny plastic nib near the back and on the marker and on the cap. You may think that a tiny plastic stub couldn't do anything, but it's just big enough to completely stop the marker from rolling, even on steep inclines, and it's thick enough to not be rubbed or snapped off. I'd say it stays in place better than many hexagonal pencils. #3: The cap that snaps in place. Expo marker caps slide into place, which leads many markers to be partly capped and then dry out. Pilot's board master caps snap into place like the cap on a ballpoint pen. They're either 100% on or 100% off. There's no grey area, and no need to worry about a marker drying out overnight. #4: the cap and marker base are rounded, not flat. These markers are supposed to be stored horizontally, otherwise they could dry out. fortunately, both ends of the marker are rounded, so they can't be stood upright on their own. You don't have to explain how to store the markers to your coworkers at the office or to your students at school; just make sure they don't get put in a pen cup and everything will sort itself out. #5: 91% recycled content. It speaks for itself. So, now that you know that the shape of the marker was painstakingly thought about, let's talk about the quality of the marks it can make. These markers are very consistent and visible from across a room. They work well until they definitely need to be refilled. They erase without streaks or ghost writing, even after multiple days of sitting on the board. The dust, which somehow magically consolidates itself into big black flakes as you erase, falls to the floor instead of floating in the air. There is an odor, but it's not very pronounced unless you're actively trying to think of how it smells. Nobody but the person holding the marker will be able to smell it at all. By now, I should have convinced you that these are the markers to buy, and I haven't even talked about the fact that these are refillable. The packaging states that they can be refilled up to four times. This is a lie. Upon careful inspection by an entire floor of college dorm students, including many nights where the floor's entire board would be filled with one person's mathematical equations, these markers could be refilled TWELVE TIMES. Yes, five markers are all you need for dozens of students doing college level homework over the course of two semesters. By the end of the year, three of the markers were "lost", either stolen for personal use or thrown out, so the remaining markers had to pull double duty. The orange marker was repourposed into an alternating amalgamation of black and blue ink cartridges, and at some point I believe someone refilled the red one with green (yick) but we could all still write with them, and they still wrote extremely well. There are only a few things that could be improved. I'd like to see an eraser built into the markers, because that's generally a bonus. I'd like to see Pilot actually sell the replacement tips that these markers are supposedly compatible with but which don't appear to be available anywhere. Finally, I'd like to see a thinner tipped version, or the ability to convert these markers into thin-tipped bullet tips. The thickness is great for a presentation, but a bit too wide for personal work. Pilot was advertising thin tipped Board Master markers a while back, for personal use, but from what I can tell that was only available in Europe and it's no longer sold anywhere. It's a real shame. Get these markers. Get the "three sets of five colors" pack (15 markers total), just in case someone throws one out. If you do get the single assorted pack, it's currently ten dollars on Pilot's website and thirteen dollars here. These markers have no downsides. Read more
