Today I want to take a quick look at the Staedtler Metallic Gold and Silver Markers (via Amazon). I guess this is more of a preliminary look rather than a full review because I realized a few days ago that I need to do a full review and comparison of gold and silver metallic markers. Its kind of a niche market, but in doing some research online I realized that there doesn’t seem to be an agreed upon best in class solution in this area.
Usually the best place to test out some silver and gold metallic markers is on black paper, so in this case I picked some nice black construction paper. The contrast of the gold and silver metallic markers on black paper gives the best visual of how intense each of the colors can be. In the case of the Staedtler Metallic Gold and Silver Markers, they really pop against the black background of the construction paper. The pens are marked with a 1-2mm tip width and since they are felt tipped that makes sense since the more pressure you put on them, the more they kind of mash down on the paper creating a wider line. They have a really solid line that doesn’t skip or appear to be transparent at all in any of the testing I did.
One minor issue I had with the Staedtler Metallic Gold and Silver markers was with posting the caps on them. In the picture above you can see the cap posted and the frustrating thing is that gap between the bottom of the cap and the top of the pen. Although its on there pretty tight, I just found it to be a bit odd that it didn’t post all the way down, so visually it looks like it could fall off while in reality its on there pretty solidly.
On a personal level the main reason I was looking at these Staedtler Metallic Gold and Silver markers is to use for autographs on a glossy photo, so when I started researching and saw that there were no real commonly accepted standards for markers to use for this I thought I’d need to test out a few for myself. The above photo shows a few test writing samples and you can see on the left there is some smudging going on there, so these are probably not going to be the ideal answer for me. If you want to suggest any alternatives to include in a head to head comparison test that I plan on doing, please feel free to drop a note in the comments below. I’m excluding any paint or oil based markers though. I plan on doing some water tests and some sun exposure tests to see which would hold up best for autographs. Besides the Staedtler Metallic Gold and Silver markers (via Amazon) I’ll also be taking a look at the Bic Mark It Permanent Metallic Markers (via Amazon) and the Sharpie Metallic Permanent markers (also via Amazon) since the Bic did well in the head to head comparison of the standard version to the Sharpies.
I’d like to see you do a review on metallic pens. I like “Slicci” but would like to hear your review.