The newest member of the Baron Fig Archer Pencil Family is the Prismatic (via the Baron Fig website). They are the first new Archer offering since the Snakes and Ladders edition that had some issues with the cores being off center causing lots of breakage issues. Knowing how Baron Fig established themselves with a mind of continually improving their products and reacting to customer feedback, I was naturally very curious to see how these new Prismatic pencils compared.
The Baron Fig Prismatic come in a pretty festive looking purple tube which contains 4 turquoise pencils, 4 yellow pencils, and 4 red pencils. Each color has a designated shape printed on one side of the length of each barrel. The red version have a pyramids, the yellow version (hard to see) have squares and rectangles, and the turquoise version have varying lengths of cylinders.
The pattern runs down the length of the body but is only printed on one side of the pencil, while the Baron Fig name is printed at the top of the opposite side. Each pencil also has a deep purple top.
On average the pencils weigh about 0.151 oz, and ranged from 1.42 all the way up to 1.62 oz as pictured above. Not sure what the standard deviation should be as I don’t run a giant pencil manufacturing operation though. Ill need to do more bulk pencil reviews so I can start tracking such things.
As I mentioned, the last batch of limited edition Baron Fig Archer Pencils (The Snakes and Ladders edition) had some off center lead cores that ended up causing some serious breakage issues while sharpening them. The first thing I wanted to do when I saw these was to check on that visually and then do some test sharpening. A quick eyeball shows that the majority of these looked pretty dead on center with only one looking to be a little off. If you don’t see it, it’s the red one on the bottom, second from the left.
Kind of a rough picture, but you get the idea on this one with the cracked wood case. This is not the one that was off center, but the crack was a little more concerning to me so I wanted to capture that.
After sharpening the whole lot of Baron Fig Prismatic Pencils, I was pleased to see that this time only one of them broke on me, instead of the majority of them breaking that I experienced with the Snakes and Ladders version. Oddly enough it was one of the turquoise ones that broke which didn’t seem visually off center. The one with the cracked wood case held up well in the initial sharpening too, it’s the red one on the top right there. Overall a pleasing experience with these so far. I haven’t done a ton of writing but I was just really impressed to see Baron Fig so quickly address the issues experienced with the previous version. Check out the Baron Fig Prismatic Archer here and enjoy some of these fun and vibrant pencils for yourself.
“I haven’t done a ton of writing but I was just really impressed to see Baron Fig so quickly address the issues experienced with the previous version.”
This batch does look better than the last, but with 2 out of 12 pencils (16.7%) having visually obvious defects, IMO their quality issues are still not under control.