Pen #38.
OfficeMax Erasable Highlighters

Well, I picked these up the other day while strolling through OfficeMax basically because I had a bunch of coupons and a $15 off $50 coupon to use and I had to get some stuff to reach my $50 mark. So when I saw these (and was for some reason reminded of the “magic pens” of my youth… You know, the ones that you could write with on blank paper and colors would appear…), I knew I should at least give them a try… So, I took one of each of the “main types” of pens and highlighted a selection with each color, then tried erasing it… Check the pictures below for the results…

Pre-Erase Test

Post-Erase Test

As you can see, the highlighter part works great (other than the fact that they smeared the ink gel a bit and were a little too dark on the pencil), as for the eraser part, well… It was just okay. The eraser portion of the pen seemed to smear just about all the writing it was drug over, as well as not quite erasing all the way on all the colors. The purple highlighter was the best, perhaps due to it being the darkest color, at erasing cleanly and easily. You’ll also notice that I did an “erasability” test in order to see whether the number of swipes with the “eraser tip” affected how well it erased, and as you can see above, it did to some degree, although after a while, the moisture from the eraser began to wear a hole in the paper…

Seems like OfficeMax was trying to get on the current erasable craze (ie. the Pilot Frixion Pens and Highlighters as well as the Uni-ball Fanthom line), but they didn’t quite put enough thought into it. While not a product that I would probably buy again, these highlighters work relatively well for being a store brand product.

3.5 out of 5 stars…