Pentel Graphgear 500 vs Pentel P205

The $3.50 price swayed me. And, happily, the leads don’t break more than my 0.5mm pencils

There is still the glaring and unforgiveable problem of how when a piece of lead is about used up the last few centimeters get stuck in the tip, outside the advancer, so you have to pull it out. This is absurd and ridiculous, and so many pencils still do this. The pentel eSharp is pretty good at keeping lead alive longer, but it's an even cheaper pencil and rather unattractive. I can't give the product five stars because the old adage "don't fix what ain't broke" doesn't apply here: there are some big improvements that should be being made about pencils, and unfortunately Pentel is resting on its laurels

This is a nice pencil for the money. Nice weight towards the writing part of the pencil. Smooth action in advancing the lead. The metal knurled part feels nice in your hand, much better than common cheap mechanical pencils do

I weighed the parts of some Pentel P205 pencils, from Gen 3 to modern. The weight of most parts has decreased over the years. The weight of the caps on the older models is going to be a little heavier because they contain a metal cap stop inserted (this was removed in the modern pencils in favor of a step cut into the mechanism).