The JINHAO X750 has been much commented on of late and seems to be well received, for the most part. I decided to have a look at one myself and found it was cheap beyond cheap! I bought mine from Amazon for a ridiculous £2.99 and I believe you can find them even cheaper in eBay. Coming from Japan, delivery took about three weeks.

This one is described as the “black, night sky” pattern. It’s quite attractive, with tiny sparkly inserts in the black paint. Some Jinhaos are heavy, others are light. This is one of the former at 38 g. It’s not the heaviest pen around but it’s too heavy for me, particularly posted. It’s quite well-balanced, though. It’s also quite big at 14.3 cm capped.

It has the usual Jinhao metalwork, chrome-plated clip, cap ring and a small accent ring at the base of the barrel. The pen clicks shut and does so very well. Unlike many Chinese pens, it doesn’t take a great effort to separate cap and barrel. Once you’ve done so, you’re presented with a matte black section, a final chrome plated ring and a very large nib. The nib is inscribed with the Jinhao logo of two men in a chariot, the word “Jinhao” and the legend “18 K GP”. The latter, I think is nonsense. Whatever it’s plated with is silver coloured and it certainly isn’t gold, not even white gold. Pull the other one, Jinhao.

When it comes to writing, despite my asking for a fine, I’ve been given a medium, which is not especially to my taste. Allowing for that it writes extremely well. No skipping or hard starting and the line is consistent. I need to try it over a few more days to be absolutely sure that there is no later hard starting but so far I’m very pleased with it.

As I’ve said before, I can’t imagine how they turn out decent, basic pens at this price. Ours not to question why, just take advantage of it if you need a very sturdy, workaday pen. This one even comes with a converter.

Moving on to another subject, these last few days of the run-up to Christmas are a quiet period. Presents have been bought and the money has been spent. I’ve already restocked the sales website and I can get on with other things. I’d been doing manual backups for years and I decided to take a new approach. I bought the Genie Backup Manager so that I could do incremental backups rather than wasting disk space doing them manually as I had been doing. Also, as my previous backup media had run out, I bought 2×1 TB external disks which should last me for a while, even allowing for double backups. In addition, I had been saving my pen photographs in the GIF file type for some reason I have long forgotten. I used the excellent Fast Stone Image Viewer to convert them all to JPG, reducing their size considerably. I am aware of the potential for loss of detail in photos that are opened and closed frequently in the JPG format, but these are for archive and are likely be opened only very infrequently, if at all.