Staedtler Fineliner 306 S Review

I’ve always been a believer in the old adage don’t judge a book by its cover. The fact that the appearance of this fineliner is not my idea of attractive, didn’t stop me giving it a chance to redeem itself by putting in a good performance.

A metal clad fibre tipped pen that writes a 0.3mm line the Staedtler Fineliner 306 S contains dry safe ink, which is airplane safe.

The automatic pressure equalisation sees to it that there’s no chance
of the in-flight service being interrupted by an ink spillage in your pocket. The company claims that pens with dry safe ink can be left uncapped for days without drying out, tested to ISO 554, there’s no reason to doubt that. During writing I left the cap of & went back to it a few times over the space of a couple of hours, the ink still flowed, unlike the old felt tips that used to fill my pencil case many moons ago, I can recall feeling happy if they made it to the end of a short drawing session.

What about performance? how did this fineliner fare in the writing stakes? A smooth line of text was achieved with ease, managing to keep up a fast pace. Although the grip section looks pretty basic, no padded comfort grip here, just a few raised grooves a couple of cm from the tip, that said they did an OK job & my fingers didn’t slip. I did note however that ink smudged when a few small droplets of water hit the page so can’t say it was waterproof, although no doubt this wouldn’t be a problem to the more cautious user.

All in all not a bad pen, although the casing is silver it doesn’t shine in my eyes, tends to give the impression of being cheap & cheerful. In its favor is the fact that the polypropylene plastic
is likely to be long lasting, resisting heat & solvents, it’ll probably outlive the ink in the barrel.

The Staedtler 306 S has a pocket clip & end cap with 4 small vented sections which denotes the ink color & is available with black, blue & red ink.

If you use Copic Markers for drawing with then check out our guide to which fineliners are good to use with Copic markers.