Krishna Paakezah: Outside the bottle.

[Dimy]

Introduction and Elephant in the room

 

Lets take elephants out of picture. First is controversy that surrounded the bottle design which actually is a patent design of Gecko design and this was cause of issue which has been addressed since then. What happened behind the scene is of no concern to me as end result seems to be good for all. Basically ink is available to buy.

 

Now bottle is well already quite nice looking and half of the folks (including me) would probably jump the gun for bottle over other blue ink, so before diving in ink lets clear this guy out. There are some pros and cons of this bottle design. First what the bottle was originally designed for by gecko is to be used as ink well and it works great as such, any pro and con arises from this very fact so use as you may.

Ink was shipped separately outside the box to prevent mishaps during shipping so starting point is empty bottle.

 

Pros include looks, nice design for dips and general filling of ink and well attraction factor (all those who saw the bottle ask where I got it from and if only bottle is available and if larger size is present...so yeah it attracts attention) last the separation of ink mouth and reservoir has real practical benefits when using dip pens and filling pens. There is one other from what I feel but its too vague so I won’t put here.

 

Cons include, glass is on thinner side so be careful. There is bubble issue which happens as if reservoir has ink over channel. The issue is not really as big of deal and can be delt with by moving bottle a bit. Last is size of mouth. I have not seen problem with my pens but I have a feeling that absolute jumbo pens like ranga ganesha might not fit properly to extract the inks from mouth in respect that nib not dipping completely..can’t test it as I lack such pens.

All in all its one unique bottle and sure will be liked a lot.

 

 

Ink review section

 

Paakezah in persian is a word for ‘pure’ and this ink and so the reference of ink as the complete blue on Krishna website. Ink is first in line of Krisna’s S series inks which they say is safe sheen ink for vintage pens and I agree with them on this after testing it.

 

Test papers include

75gsm sectra copy paper

70gsm and 85gsm nightingale paper

52gsm classmate copy paper

100gsm JK Cedar bond papers.

Random books back sides and some unknown real cheap papers.

 

Ink properties

 

Bleeding/Ghosting – None seen on any paper tested except for cheap ones.

Feathering – None to minimal on very cheap ones.

Saturation – Good

Flow – Balanced flow with very slight tending to wet side.

Dry time - varies from 12 to 20 seconds.

Sheen – moderately high.

Shading – Not seen as shades are pretty much sheen spots.

Water Resistance – none (will not survive water).

 A write sample in high resolution meant to test the new limits of uploads plus general opinion of ink. The camera is pea shooter phone camera. I tried to get as accurate color as I could with phone. the image is quite accurate just tiny bit more dark then in real....

 

water resistance results.

 

Paakezah shows no other color, at least in normal case I still have not tested chromatic test, other then blue and its shades. The sheen seen has metallic color and is reddish-violet. The ink show high sheen on decent papers but non-absorbing papers are preferred as with all sheen inks. I must point out though that it is by no means a sheen monster but there is enough sheen that one will not have to look for it, its simply visible on paper in all its glory when seen with naked eye and the fact that I can see such on mostly normal papers says a lot.

 

some sheen seen in writing. The entire page has such results just hard to get photograph in one go.

 

I feel the ink lies on darker spectrum of blue, its very blue just not light shade. All in all its interesting in respect that it manages to separate itself from usual blue lots like waterman serenity blue and lamy blue ink even without any sheen. Still sheen is the highlight and you might wanna go with decent paper on this one.

 

screenshot if ink from Krishna inks website

 

There were never any hard starts or skips in 3 pens that I tried with decent flow maintained in all types of writing from fast to weird. Wality 69EB, Ranga Slim Bamboo and Oliver Exam pen are 3 test lots.

 

Now cleaning is easy and water is suffice here. As for safe..well I tried clogging the pen with the ink by letting the nib open and drying the pen for one day...still managed to clean the pens with soap water. There ware no stains left and disassembly of the pen showed no clogs or residue. So I think it should be safe for any pen. I tested these results on Oliver exam pen which is clear demonstrator and makes it easy to observe such results.

 

other sample with full page writing. Do tell if higher resolution image is preferred over this one.

 

All in all a nice ink even without the bottle.

 

Conclusion

 

For the price of Rs 949..or approx. $12.5 without delivery….its a steal especially with the bottle and by looks of it being mostly on pre-order I will say that its selling like cakes. The customer service of Krishna inks was great, all orders were placed from their website and notifications were sent via email. Any quarries and questions were replied via email and replied within 2 days. It was a pleasant experience overall.

 

Disclaimer: entire writing seen is done on 100GSM JK cedar paper. I lack tomoe river but I am confident the ink will sheen more on that page.

[lapis]

Thanks for this nice review. The bottle really does look interesting (first seen in another post somewhere else here on the forum a good month ago) and I hope that the glass at least around the bulb isn't too  thin, even for that price. I also love that colour, a blue which is dark but still bright at the same time.

Only one question: due to the large size of the bulb, wouldn't it be possible to overload the whole thing while filling it so that an opening of the cap later would get half of the ink poured out onto the desk???

[Chiroptera121]

Excellent review, thanks!  The shading and sheen are quite nice.  The bottle is quite unique too!

[OCArt]

OK, I'll admit it. I bought it for the bottle!

[Dimy]

8 hours ago, lapis said:

Thanks for this nice review. The bottle really does look interesting (first seen in another post somewhere else here on the forum a good month ago) and I hope that the glass at least around the bulb isn't too  thin, even for that price. I also love that colour, a blue which is dark but still bright at the same time.

Only one question: due to the large size of the bulb, wouldn't it be possible to overload the whole thing while filling it so that an opening of the cap later would get half of the ink poured out onto the desk???

 

Thanks. Yeah the ink color is really nice exactly as said dark blue while being bright.

No glass is not too thin, its just thinner then say a bottle of waterman ink. Part of the reason it feels extra thin is because of bulge design so yeah its not gonna break by handling normally and it will break when fell from height (I think all glass do). The thing is on my table for over a month collecting pollen in all of its glory and being cleaned from time to time with no issues. This bottle has been subjected to more abuse then my iroshizuku bottles which are kept in drawer nicely packed

 

Now to second question and this was interesting one when I first saw the bottle too. A pic to start.

 

So to answer the question in one line, it won't normally happen.

 

Now why is also a reason. As seen in above pic the ink in reservoir has more ink then dip section. What I think is that a bit of physics is at play in respect that there is no actual hole in reservoir apart from one connecting the dip section (I mean...yeah...) which means that once air is inside the reservoir it can't get any extra air from outside creating a pressure equilibrium in reservoir. This means that there is nothing to actually push the reservoir ink down to force it in dip section once the equilibrium is established and because the channel is small and air trap cannot be high even if reservoir was more empty, the equilibrium is formed very fast as seen above.

 

So how to get more ink, simply tilt the bottle a bit towards dip section and ink will flow, you will hear bubbles when it does and it can be done when cap is on as extra precaution step. This works as when tilted the air trapped inside moves as well creating difference of pressure at those points thus forcing ink to move to dip section.

 

This is clever but not fool proof, if one tilts bottle upside down or well close to 90 degree rotation there is high chance that ink will come out.......but at that point one is really trying to take ink out anyway.

 

In short don't worry about this issue, it wont arise in any normal use. The ink reservoir should safely handle approx. 35ml even without reaching at limit of dip section. Currently the reservoir has about 27 ml ink in it give or take.

 

8 hours ago, Chiroptera121 said:

Excellent review, thanks!  The shading and sheen are quite nice.  The bottle is quite unique too!

 

Thanks and yeah they do but I feel the sheen overtakes the shading very fast, its just hard to take the picture of it.

 

4 hours ago, OCArt said:

OK, I'll admit it. I bought it for the bottle!

 

Me too, came for the bottle stayed for the ink and bottle.

[inkstainedruth]

Thanks for the review.  This looks like a nice color.  It would be interesting to see it in a side by side comparison with other sheening dark blues (I'm thinking KWZI Chicago Blue LE, Akkerman Shocking blue, and Colorverse Stars and Stripes in particular, because I have all those.  Guess I need to add this to my "samples" wish list.  Sigh.  I already have too many samples that I haven't tried yet....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Dimy]

8 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

Thanks for the review.  This looks like a nice color.  It would be interesting to see it in a side by side comparison with other sheening dark blues (I'm thinking KWZI Chicago Blue LE, Akkerman Shocking blue, and Colorverse Stars and Stripes in particular, because I have all those.  Guess I need to add this to my "samples" wish list.  Sigh.  I already have too many samples that I haven't tried yet....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

your welcome.

That's a very interesting idea indeed...sadly I live in other end of spectrum with clear deficit of ink, which mostly will remain that way due to 'not buying new until ending 70%' idea of mine, but still a nice idea which I would appreciate very much.

I don't think there are sample of this ink directly, at least not yet but who knows maybe someone is doing them.