Review: Jase All Weather Lined Notebook

Temu is littered with Rite in the Rain style waterproof notebooks which are significantly cheaper. I decided to experiment with them a bit and see if the quality is sufficient to justify purchasing them instead of the real thing. I have never owned the real thing, but if the quality is good enough, then there is no need to compare them directly. In this post I cover my experiments with various pens and pencils.

Testing

The basic experiment setup was to simply mark the same sheet of paper with various pens and pencils, then subject the sheet to different exposures to water and different physical forces.

Writing Implements

The following pens and pencils were used in the experiment:

• BiC SOFT Feel Medium
• Fisher Space Pen
• Mechanical Pencil
• Ultra fine point sharpie
• Highlighter

Finger Smear

Since the waterproofing of the notebooks is achieved by coating the paper, the first test was to simply see how the coating affects the usability even in dry condition. The primary concern is whether or not the coating will lead to smearing.

Protocol: Write a simple sample for each implement, then attempt to smear with my finger.

Initial Sample

Smear Result

After using my finger to smear the samples, it appears that all samples hold up reasonably well, but there is some smearing with the Fisher Space Pen and the mechanical pencil.

This is not particularly surprising, as the waterproof coating also reduces the ability of ink and graphite to attach to the paper. This is a price that one must pay for the supposed benefits. Accordingly, we needed to investigate those benefits directly.

Quick Rinse and Smear

After establishing a baseline of usability, the ability of the paper to resist light exposure to water was tested. As a starting point.

Protocol: Quickly rinse the paper under the faucet, then attempt to smear with my finger.

Post Rinsing

After quickly rinsing the paper, no obvious changes were observed.

Smear Result

The smearing, however, was rather devastating for the mechanical pencil and additional smearing was observed with the Fisher Space Pen.

Five Minute Soak

The next test was to determine what happens when we move from brief exposure to water to soaking in water.

Protocol: Soak the paper submerged in water for five minutes, blot dry, then attempt to smear with my finger.

Post Soak

Similar to the quick rinse, the soak did not seem to have any impact on the samples.

Smear Result

The smearing, though, almost removed the mechanical pencil samples entirely and, while there still wasn’t obvious smearing, the BiC pen seemed to fade. The Fisher Space Pen was degraded even more than in the previous tests and the Sharpie appears to be blurring.

One thing to consider with the BiC pen is the color. Perhaps the smearing is less visible due to the color. Either way, the pen seems to hold up rather well.

One Hour Soak

The final exposure test was to determine the impact of prolonged exposure to water.

Protocol: Soak the paper submerged in water for one hour, blot dry, then attempt to smear with my finger.

Post Soak Smear Result

This test led to significant degradation of the paper itself. Interestingly, where the paper is not physically damaged, the samples seem to be holding roughly as well as before.

Writing While Damp

Another aspect to test was how soaking the paper impacts writing. In other words, can we add marks to the paper when already wet?

Protocol: Make additional marks on the soaked paper.

Damp Writing Result

When adding new samples to the paper, we attempted to avoid the damaged paper so that we would only be testing the ability of the undamaged paper to hold ink when written on wet.

The mechanical pencil did not perform well and the Sharpie had some trouble as well (note that I needed to write the D twice). No additional smearing was attempted, as it was assumed that this would simply lead to physical damage as we saw in the previous experiment.

Testing Unfinished Paper

At this point, the paper had many uncoated sections from the smearing, exposing the raw, underlying paper. I was curious how this paper would hold up with soaking.

Protocol: Write new samples on the unfinished paper, soak for two hours

New Samples

This was a rushed test and the initial result is, of course, not surprising: writing on uncoated paper works well!

Post Soak

Also, the result of soaking was not unexpected: without smearing, the soaked samples bled. Interestingly, though, the bleeding wasn’t too bad. Also, we can see that the previous Damp sample for the Fisher Space Pen blurred quite a bit as well. It’s possible that this part of the paper coating was somewhat damaged in the previous experiments.

Soap

Considering how well the paper worked in the previous experiments, I decided to go ahead and push things further by applying soap to see what impact that might have.

Protocol: Rinse the paper with soapy water.

Post Washing Result

Washing with soap managed to cause considerably more damage to the Fisher Space Pen and also had a noticeable impact on the BiC, even on the undamaged paper. On the damaged sections, all samples were degraded considerably.

Writing While Wet

After all of the above testing, I decided to try one last writing and smearing test to see if the previous damage, soap, etc. would significantly degrade the paper’s performance.

Protocol: Write new samples on wet paper and immediately attempt to smear

New Samples On Wet Paper

Writing on the damaged, abused and wet paper resulted in blurred, but clearly legible samples.

Smear Result

However, the smear test caused considerable degradation of the samples.

Conclusion

After performing these experiments, I was surprised by a few things:

• The cheap notebook performs reasonably well, even in worst case scenarios, so it would likely perform very well for most realistic use cases.
• The Fisher Space Pen performs much worse than I would have expected in all scenarios.
• The cheap, random BiC I had lying around was incredibly capable of resisting degradation.

Possible Quality Issue

After carrying one of these notebooks for many months, I did have a problem with the back cover breaking at the point of the spiral binding. Not having used a genuine Rite in the Rain notebook, I can not compare this aspect of the notebooks.