Inky T O D - Ink Review Series - Next - What Information Do You Want To See?

July 1, 2018

What is the cellophane tape for?

It's not tape (not sticky), it makes the pen drier and inks look lighter, with no negative impact on starting and flow. For instance Sailor Souten always looked very dark, now looks more interesting.

July 2, 2018

It's not tape (not sticky), it makes the pen drier and inks look lighter, with no negative impact on starting and flow. For instance Sailor Souten always looked very dark, now looks more interesting.

This sounds interesting! Some very dark inks have very beautiful light base colours/tones (I am not sure what to call it), your method would bring those out beautifully

September 7, 2018

Thank you for this wonderful discussion thread, and it's great to see the amount of recent activity and input in it.

I'm still trying to tidy up and clarify my thoughts on ink reviews, but I think all of the information I seek must inform the answers one or more of the three fundamental questions for me:

Do I buy a bottle (or several bottles) of it?

As I've noted before, options to sample a variety of commercially available inks (say, of a particular hue or colour group) are few to Australian fountain pen users, and none that one would say is cost-effective on an on-demand basis. We can't even seem to organise a crowd-sourced travelling library of ink samples and giveaways to do the rounds across the country (or continent) because of the postal charges and the absence of critical mass of enthusiasts.

As a consequence, if I'm the one reviewing an ink, then that question has already been answered (for me), and with anywhere between 15ml to 100ml more of that ink at my disposal, not a question that needs to be revisited soon.

Information on local (and/or online) availability and retail pricing would certainly help inform the answer to this question, but then such information has dubious lasting value in a review (as opposed to a this-point-in-time discussion) that may be (re)read months or years later, and in any case that sort of research is definitely not something I think reviewers ought to be burdened with either doing or relieving.
Do I fill one of my ‘favourite’ pens up with it (without feeling the need or urge to clean it out after three hours or three days)?

I don't like disassembling (as fully as I can) my ‘favourite’ pens and ‘EDC’ pens for cleaning for the purpose of switching inks, so I'd want something to allow me to reasonably project or forecast the performance of an ink in a particular fountain pen in my stable. Wetness or dryness matters, but then I can probably tell quite a bit about that just seeing it used with the dip pen nibs I use as ‘standard’ testing.

I have a H-F ruthenium-plated 21K gold nib on my Sailor Professional Gear Imperial Black edition, but it doesn't play well with every ink (including Sailor seiboku pigment ink) and tends to give me hard starts with some inks even after 30 seconds, but that is not something I expect to be exhibited with every Sailor 1911 H-F nib (or even just the 21K gold ones), so the only way to confirm whether an ink is or isn't a problem with my pen in that model is to test it myself. That is why I don't think it's reasonable or useful to ‘demand’ or want some other reviewer to show me how it performs in his/her Japanese F/EF nib, as if that would give me a definitive answer.
Do I use it (for the particular application at hand or which I have in mind)?

I personally have no ‘real’ or ‘practical’ use for broad nib, and so I don't own one that fits or is fitted on any of my fountain pens. I don't even like the look of the output from most medium nibs. When I get around to practising beginner's (specifically Western Latin character sets based) calligraphy, I'd use a dip pen. I suppose you can call the Concord and Fude nibs broad nibs, but then I don't usually write much in English with them. Shading and sheen (and colour-shifts and shimmer, etc.) arising from writing in the ink with an EF/F nib on a fountain pen are only mildly interesting artefacts, and not unequivocally positive features since they may affect legibility and uniformity in presentation. Characteristics such as feathering (which could stop me from using an ink), bleedthrough, water resistance, and so on are far, far more relevant, but then I don't really need to see whether an ink feathers when writing in the margins when completing a crossword puzzle on newsprint; I don't even care that much about whether the ink feathers or bleeds through on cheap photocopy paper at the office on which interim work products (or someone else's document) are printed, so writing on Clairefontaine, Rhodia and/or Leuchtturm1917 journal and notepad papers are the primary application for myself and my fiancée in which those characteristics matter. Of course, it is sometimes fun to see whether an ink lives up to its marketing claims of being feathering-resistant or waterproof by writing on a paper napkin or on newsprint.