I bought my first Asvine P20 fountain pen almost a year ago but somehow never got around to reviewing it, despite it being an interesting pen. The fact that I now have two of these should be a spoiler though – I really like the P20!

Asvine is a Chinese pen brand that, along with Jinhao, gets some flack for making ‘knock-off’ pens that strongly resemble other pen designs. And it’s undeniable that the P20 shares a lot of design elements with the Leonardo Momento Zero, a pen that costs several times the price of the P20 (which retails for a reasonable £35 on Amazon here in the UK – less if you buy it from AliExpress). 

Both models of pen have the same shape, with conical ends, and a distinctive central band on the cap. They both even have the same style of clip with the roll stop, and both pen models come in a range of swirling colour variations that really catch the eye. 

But does being a cheaper dupe of another pen make the Asvine P20 a ‘bad pen’? Not necessarily. Without going into the ethics of companies ‘copying’ pen designs, the Asvine P20 as a standalone is a great-looking pen that works well. 

The first Asvine P20 I bought was the Lake Blue one, which has a bright blue base colour, swirled with green and warm brown. It’s a really pretty acrylic, with a nice chatoyance, although I imagine the colour variation differs with each pen. I feel like mine has a nice mix of the different colours! 

The second P20 I bought is just as nice, and is in a newer colourway: Gradual Purple. It’s an eye-catching mix of magenta pink and purple, with a surprising amount of depths for a cheap acrylic pen. 

There are seven other colour options available, including a green and an amber variation. But it is slightly confusing that so many of the colour options are so similar: there’s four different blue variations that to my eye look almost identical. 

The P20 is a piston-filler pen, which is a nice feature for the price of the pen. Both of mine work smoothly, and I like that you can see the ink sloshing around through the ink window just below the cap. As with a lot of piston fillers I have found it tricky to get a good fill with these, but they have a good capacity when you do. 

As a bigger pen I find it really comfortable in the hand, but that would all depend on your preference. It does post, but not securely, and it makes the pen too top heavy anyway. 

The writing experience itself is really impressive! My P20s have fine and extra fine nibs, and both of them are smooth and wet writers. In fact, the writing experience is every bit as good as a similar piston-filler pen that I own – the Nahvalur Voyage – despite it being a fraction of the price. Perhaps that’s unsurprising, given they’re both steel-nibbed pens, but it goes to show the Asvine stock nibs are decent. I’ve had no issues with skipping or hard starts, and I’ve had the blue P20 for almost a year. 

I bought that first P20 at the beginning of my fountain pen journey, before I was willing to invest more money in individual pens. But I still feel like the pen holds up, and I still use both of my P20s regularly, despite now owning a few higher end pens. So if you’re in the market for a brightly coloured piston-filler pen for a reasonable price, I don’t think you can go far wrong with the Asvine P20!

So do you own any Asvine pens? What do you think of them?