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Has anyone tried any of the 芸景堂 (yún jǐng táng) inks, especially those from Season Seven, which seem to be in the vein of the lighter, multi-hued colours in the Sailor Ink Studio line? Source: AliExpress At nominally US$8.80 per 30ml bottle, I think they're priced competitively against Sailor Ink Studio and Sailor Manyo inks, assuming that they are as good and/or interesting as the Japanese inks. However, shipping charges for bottle of ink (and often customs issues with exporting liquids through the post from China) and border taxes lift the effective averaged cost of acquisition to over US$13 a bottle if I were to order all three of the above at once, and still have to keep my fingers crossed that they get past Chinese Customs and get delivered here intact and without incident, so I'm not as gung-ho about just spending money on them as I usually would be. There's also this seemingly colour-shifting shimmer ink: Source: AliExpress but my confidence level is quite low in shimmer inks from China having consistently small particle size to not cause clogging in my (typically Fine-nibbed) fountain pens.

One thing I noticed having used a wide variety of inks is that the Peacock, DUX, and Hero inks can be very inexpensive but quite usable. Buying them in China, I was paying $1.50 to $2.00 USD per bottle. Shopping for fountain pen ink in China the color choices I saw were limited to black, blue, blue-black, and red. I've never seen green, purple, or pink other colors on sale there that wouldn't be usable for school and business purposes. The Chinese inks I've used tend to be dry-writing and permanent. What struck me about that was that when I purchased a bottle of made in the USA permanent Noodler's blue/black ink in New York City a few year's ago the price was $12.00 for a 1 oz bottle - permanent ink in other brands were priced higher. When I purchased a 50 ml (1.7 oz) bottle of Chinese brand DUX blue/black permanent ink, the cost was only $1.78. That was in China but one can purchase Chinese inks on Ebay for about $4.25 USD. That's still only about one third the cost of other permanent inks. Should members have the opportunity to visit China, you may want to bring back a supply of fountain pen ink. Pen ink is much more widely available there than in the USA. Also, take a chance on a bottle of Hero ink on Ebay. You may be pleasantly surprised by the quality.