P205D & P205B Sharp Pencils

In this blog I will go over the P205D Green and P205B Burgandy pencils that I own.

I don’t know when the P205D was first released, but I have back to Generation 3, which places it in the mid-1970’s.  The only image I have of pencils from that era is a 1975 German Pentel Catalog cover, and it does not show up there, but that really doesn’t say anything, since it looks like the P203, P205, P207 & P209 are Generation 2 (no text on the side) on the cover but the other variations are Generation 3.

One thing I have seen in various places around the internet, but have personally never been able to verify, is that originally the P200 Green was a 0.4mm pencil, instead of the current 0.5mm.  It was said to only be available in Japan, but again, I have never seen anything substantial about it (i.e. pictures), only hearsay.  It does make some sense, since Pentel does use green for 0.4 mm pencils even today, for example the Graphgear 1000 (PG1014) and Graphgear 500 (PG514).

P205D Generation 3

This is a recent acquisition for my collection, which as I said above, pushes the original release date for this pencil back into the mid-70’s.

This generation is the first to have text printed on the side, but still has the molded size on the bottom.

P205D Generation 4

I have had this pencil for a couple of years and up until January of this year, it was the oldest I had found for the P205D.

The only difference between this generation and the previous is they stopped molding the size into the bottom of the pencil.

P205D Generation 5

I purchased this off eBay last October.  The hard part of finding the different generation of pencils is that unless you can see the cutout with the mark (as in the picture above), or they remove the cap and you can see a green eraser, it is hard to tell if you are getting a Generation 5 or 6.  Even telling the difference between a Generation 3 and 4 is hard, since most photos concentrate on the text, not the other areas of the pencil.

Again, this is the first generation with the current text on the side, dropping the / in the mm.

P205D Generation 6

This is the first of the green P205s that I purchased back in 2009.  This was before I started collecting only P200s, and definitely before I realized the evolution of the pencils.

This model is the current version of the green pencil, as far as I know.

P205B Generation 6

I picked this pencil up at the same time as the Gen 6 P205D above. I had just started to collect mechanical pencils in general at that time, but only did so for about a year before I specialized in the P200 Sharp Family.

As far as I know, this is the only generation available for this pencil.