I love getting feedback from my customers! especially because it is so uniformly uplifting! Who wouldn’t be happy swapping a poorly writing refill with one that writes smoothly?
Some people will not be able to tell the difference between our smooth German ink and the original Livescribe refills… but, they are probably happy with the original refills…
I will always stand behind my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you are not happy writing with our refills, send them back and we’ll refund the purchase price. I might write to ask you why you aren’t satisfied, that will help me to help other customers better, so I hope you’ll respond.
I’ve put up a couple of new pages today so that you can see the feedback our Generic Refills have gotten on eBay and on Amazon.com. I hope you can spend a minute and take a look if you haven’t had a chance to write with our Generic Refills yet!
Generic Refills 
I received my (first) order of 5 blue fine-point refills today. I am pleased with the service and professionalism, and very happily surprised by the inclusion of sample medium-tip as an unrequested bonus. I look forward to trying them out over the next few days–I use my Livescribe pen primarily (almost exclusively) in committee meetings with clients that I conduct in my role as a consultant, and I have a number of these meetings next week. Thank you, Generic Refills! (And, if I could make a request: when you are able make red and green ink available! The tips are so easy to switch, that I use black/blue to take notes without audio, green for anything with audio associated (to correspond to the pencast), and red for actions/tasks, and to highlight/mark as important during the review process. Would be nice to have quality for all colors!)
Hello Rick,
Thanks for the compliments! Sales of Generic Refills that come thru my website or eBay are actually handled by me, this allows me to include samples. This doesn’t happen for those that purchase from Amazon. I’ve been wondering why I’ve been getting requests for Green ink! It should have occurred to me but thanks for letting me know how you use colors. We’ve got black refills coming. I’ll check with my manufacturer to see if they have some nice green ink. Their red German ink is pretty nice but I haven’t convinced myself that I’d be able to sell enough of it to warrant a big custom production run. Do you think that users would pay more for Red, Green or other colors? In a smaller production run, the prices of these refills can be much higher.
Let us all know how you like the blue German ink!
I don’t know about others, but I would pay a bit more…I’d have to think about how much, but it would definitely be worth something extra for me.
I was wondering which refills you use for green and red ink? and do you shorten them yourself?
For red I just use the Livescribe refills (but would love something better). Green is truly a wish at this point–I’ve not found anything that works. I have shortened a few different brands with Foray being the most successful in terms of easy to cut/smooth/etc. It’s been so long I honestly don’t remember the other brands I tried. None of them, however, made much of an improvement in the ink quality, and not really worth the effort. (And none of them had green ink.) The easiest/cleanest way I found to shorten them was to use a cut-off wheel with my Dremel tool. An issue I’ve found with shortening the D1 size, though, is that they tend to leak when you travel via airplane. I fly a fair amount and luckily carry my spares in a small plastic tube, as the first time I experienced this I found that the pressure caused them to not only leak but do so rather forcefully–the inside of the tube (it’s clear) was covered with droplets of ink as if it had exploded inside. This has happened several times since. I’ve not tried plugging them, though as I type this it occurs to me that this would be a rather logical and fairly easy to try fix… I do have a set of “gel” ink refills by Zebra and Ohto that I want to try shortening when I get around to it. My “getting around to it” ability seems to be rather lacking these days though, and besides if these refills I just got are what I hope they are then I won’t have to, ha!
Well, exploding ink refills does sound messy! Glad you had them in a tube. FYI, Monteverde makes Green D1 refills:
I’ve shortened other colors from Monteverde and they wrote quite nicely.
I wouldn’t plug the refills. I experimented with this a while back and found that our Generic Refills began to write like the lousy refills from Livescribe. Makes sense in a way, as the ink was drawn out, with the end plugged there was a vacuum formed which greatly reduced the flow of ink. The only reason I tried this was a fear of leaking ink and the fact that Livescribe’s refills had a white plug in the end.
I’m currently experimenting with the Ohto gel ink refill that will fit Livescribe once shortened. I like how they write and if you need the extremely fine line they are perfect. But the ink supply is really limited – I understand why Livescribe hasn’t gone there. I get maybe 5-7 pages of writing and graphs per refill. Definitely expensive for the amount of writing you can do, but if you need to shade a drawing nothing else works like they do!