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I understand the basic math: Wet nib = More ink = Darker ink line (appears more saturated)Dry nib = Less ink = Lighter ink line (appears less saturated)Here's where I'm stuck. Fell in love with De A's Thomas Alva Edison, convinced this was destined to be my "signature color" after using it in the TWSBI Diamond 580, M nib, filled from a sample vial (Anderson's? Goulet?). The ink was too wet for the M nib, so I swapped in a F, and the combination was magic. Deep, dark, saturated color, albeit not as much glide, due to the finer nib. Today, I finally cleaned, then filled, my Pelikan m805 Demonstrator for the first time. Same ink color---this time, using a bottle purchased from Exotic Blanks (the only folks who still had this in stock). The shock is how, in spite of there being so much ink on the page (this pen's a gusher, drats), the color looks considerably lighter than it did in a drier nib and finer line. Logic tells me this is the opposite of what one would expect. I emptied the pen, gently shook the bottle, refilled, and still...the ink looks less saturated. My question: Is De A ink inconsistent, when it comes to saturation? Did I get lucky with the sample vial, but end up with a "thinner" iteration in bottled form?

The persistence of an apparently empty fountain pen can be an amazing thing. This is not a new thought around here; it's been mentioned fairly frequently, and I've certainly run into enough examples on my own. The other day I unscrewed a Platinum 3776 to see how much ink was left in the converter. Nothing but stains. I turned it nib up to see if any ink would run back into the converter; nothing. And yet I still got another four pages out of it, in a journal only slightly smaller than an A5 size, before it skipped and sputtered to a halt. No mystery, of course. Like a sponge, a fountain pen feed can absorb quite a bit of ink. What I wonder, though, is if anyone has tried to measure the actual capacity of different feeds. Some desultory Googling failed to produce an immediate answer, so I thought I'd ask here. It's just idle curiosity, so I'm not motivated to disassemble any pens that work perfectly well to do this sort of testing. I imagine that one method would be to remove a feed completely from the pen, immerse it for a minute or two in a measured amount of ink, remove it, and then measure the ink that was left. Does anyone know of any such studies, by this or other methods? Incidentally, I can think of two opposite reactions to these pens that just keep on going and going and... This is great! I can finish taking notes in this meeting without having to borrow somebody's chewed up ballpoint. Darn it! I want to fill another pen, but I committed to writing with this one until it's dry.

I've always tried to avoid highly-saturated inks. They seem to be more of a pest to clean out of my piston-fillers, I worry about long-term problems, and I tend to prefer more muted, traditional colours anyway. Diamine used to sell its inks in two ranges, a traditional and a modern range, and the latter tended to be the more saturated inks. Now that they have merged them into a single range, is there any way to tell which inks are less saturated and which are more?