EFNIR: 3Oysters I.COLOR.U Doldam

[LizEF]

Extra Fine Nib Ink Review: 3Oysters I.COLOR.U Doldam

This is review #167 in my series.  Here's the YouTube video:

Post-recording notes: Cleaning was quick and easy. This color is so interesting, I did a mini chromatogram, which revealed pink, blue, and a brownish color! I'm thinking it's sort of a lavender grey. It's like a pale Diamine Chopin, with a wee bit more purple. The screen capture and absorbent paper images are a little dark. The scan is pretty accurate.  The zoom isn't too far off and gives a hint of the purple undertone.

The new "line width" image was taken at 100x and is one of the lines used to test dry time. The scale marked 330µm is divided into ten 33µm increments (so the line width is roughly 330µm). The grid is 100µm square.

Rather than show a zillion greys in the video, I decided to describe differences here (for those greys not in the video): De Atramentis Document Urban grey looks quite brown in comparison. De Atramentis Fog Grey looks almost green in comparison. Diamine Earl Grey looks pinkish brownish in comparison. Diamine Graphite and Diamine Grey look green. KWZ Grey Lux looks brown (loses all greyness). Monteverde Smoke Noir looks brownish grey. Papier Plum Oyster Grey looks greenish bluish grey. Pelikan Edelstein Moonstone looks like a grey slightly warm from neutral. Pilot Iroshizuku Kiri-same looks like a light pinkish brownish grey.

Dry time: The smears may be hard to see, because of how pale the ink is, but they're there.

And here is a screen of the final result, for those not interested in the video:

Scan of Completed Review:

Zoomed in photo:

Absorbent Paper Closeup (top is puzzle paper like thick newsprint, bottom is old 20lb copy paper):

Line width measured via microscope at 100x:

Chromatogram:

Images also available on Instagram: @zilxodarap

Previous Review: Colorverse Bluish Green.

Want to influence the inky sequence?  Take the "next ink" poll.

Need to catch up on The Adventures of Quin and Makhabesh?  Find the whole story here.

Hope you enjoy.  Comments appreciated!

[Sailor Kenshin]

My kind of color, my kind of chroma!  Too bad about that Eternity thing, though.   Thanks once again for these nuggets of entertainment and information.   👍🏻

[mizgeorge]

Thank you @LizEF - love the additions to the format!

 

Great review and definitely an ink I want - in spite of the dry time. Shame that, like so many interesting inks, we can't get them here  

[LizEF]

13 minutes ago, Sailor Kenshin said:

My kind of color, my kind of chroma!  Too bad about that Eternity thing, though.

I'm wondering if that's trustworthy, though.  The difference in dry time for Colorverse Bluish Green between me and @A Smug Dill has me wondering about the reliability of my dry times.  I can't explain the difference, but it's enough for me to say that if dry time is the only concern, one should go ahead and sample the ink in question and test the dry time in their own environment.  (Note that I now test dry time at least a day before doing the review and at least a day after inking - usually on day 3 - so that I'm not surprised during the review. This makes me think that it's not just some anomaly during the review - I get similar dry times on two different days, but the same paper...)

 

19 minutes ago, Sailor Kenshin said:

Thanks once again for these nuggets of entertainment and information.   👍🏻

You're very welcome.

[LizEF]

6 minutes ago, mizgeorge said:

Thank you @LizEF 

You're most welcome!

 

6 minutes ago, mizgeorge said:

love the additions to the format!

Thank you for telling me.  I'm glad I'm not the only one liking this geeky information.

 

7 minutes ago, mizgeorge said:

Great review and definitely an ink I want - in spite of the dry time. Shame that, like so many interesting inks, we can't get them here  

Perhaps in time 3 Oysters will become available more widely...  Maybe I should move to Puerto Rico and set up a fountain pen stuff import-export business....   (Of course, it would be much simpler if I did that from the Caymans, or so I hear.)

[yazeh]

Great job, Liz

I really like this colour. But I don't se grey at all. I see either a dark blurple or blue black. Which one is it?

 

As for the dry time, why not do a test on other papers, as see what gives? If an ink in an Ef pen, doesn't dry, we're in trouble. Most inks, which smudge/don't dry, do fine when I use a combination of F/EF/ dry pens...

 

[LizEF]

37 minutes ago, yazeh said:

Great job, Liz

Thanks!

 

38 minutes ago, yazeh said:

I really like this colour. But I don't se grey at all. I see either a dark blurple or blue black. Which one is it?

From the EF nib, it looks grey to me, but definitely with slight purple undertones. The zoom is more what you would see in person than the other images.  The screen capture, scan, and even the absorbent paper images are too dark.  If you've seen Diamine Chopin, this is like a pale version of that.  I think with a wet nib, it could be pretty dark (see the swatch card & Jinhao nib).  See the post-recording notes for more color comparisons.

 

42 minutes ago, yazeh said:

As for the dry time, why not do a test on other papers, as see what gives? If an ink in an Ef pen, doesn't dry, we're in trouble. Most inks, which smudge/don't dry, do fine when I use a combination of F/EF/ dry pens...

I didn't have a reason to question dry times until ASD posted his dry times for Colorverse Bluish Green, which was after I'd already recorded not only this (and that), but also next week's review - which dries faster.  Since dry time is really only useful comparatively (this ink dries faster than that ink), and I haven't changed anything but the ink¹, it does seem like the comparative dry time is still useful and valid.  The fact that not all inks take forever to dry (for me, even lately) suggests that these inks really do have long dry times.  The fact that they dried faster for ASD with theoretically larger nibs putting down more ink on the same paper (Rhodia dot pad), suggests that my dry times (eternal or not) are useful to others only when comparing them to each other (again, this ink dries faster than that).  Actual dry times for someone else can only be determined by said someone else actually testing them.  So while I've been seeing a lot of "eternal" dry times lately, that does not necessarily mean that someone else will also get eternal dry times from the ink with their pen, paper, writing style, and environmental conditions...

 

As for testing other papers - I suppose I could, but I wouldn't have historic data to compare (not having done it for any of the 170 completed reviews), and since I believe the information can only be useful in controlled comparison, I don't see much point.  It's a given that more absorbent paper will have faster dry times, but knowing my numbers for those papers isn't going to be numerically predictive for anyone else.  Thus, my Rhodia dot pad comparisons (not numbers) are the actual value provided, and should be sufficient.

 

When I'm done taking (and then uploading) the microscope line width pictures of all the historic reviews, I plan to create a read-only google "sheet" with the review data so that others can use that to analyze comparative dry times, line widths, lubrication, and flow.  Since all of these are comparative, that will be the true use of the data - being able to see how inks compare, or which have relative minimum or maximum values...  I have 61 more pictures to take², and 125 more to post (not including reviews I haven't already posted).  I may or may not work backward and do "smears" of inks I've already reviewed, but that will be for fun and I would only post the interesting ones.  There doesn't appear to be any useful "data" in said images.

 

¹In theory, my pen could be "wearing" from all the inking and cleaning and writing, and thereby writing wetter than when I started using this pen / nib...  But I don't really know how to test that accurately, so we'll just have to keep going and understand that nothing involving a human is that precise...

 

²Not including Emperor New, which I can already tell you writes the finest line I've never seen, and I'm certain nothing else will ever write that fine.

[yazeh]

@LizEF thanks for the detailed response. Often times when I have a problematic ink, I try the dry time on different papers to get a better picture of the ink's behaviour, hence my suggestion. This gives me  a ball park idea of the inks dry time behaviour.  

[Lupine]

Thank you! This one of my newest inks. I'm very happy with it. I've only used it in a BB so far.  Lots of shading. Glad to see it's so usable in an EF.

[LizEF]

1 hour ago, yazeh said:

@LizEF thanks for the detailed response. Often times when I have a problematic ink, I try the dry time on different papers to get a better picture of the ink's behaviour, hence my suggestion. This gives me  a ball park idea of the inks dry time behaviour.  

Ah.  Yes, this makes sense for someone who plans to use an ink - exploring its behavior and finding the best (of their own) pens and papers for it.  In my case, I'm just documenting my limited data set and calling it good.  I actually don't care about dry time, and none of these inks have bothered me in actual use, even on TR paper - probably because I use blotting paper for bookmarks.

[yazeh]

19 minutes ago, LizEF said:

Ah.  Yes, this makes sense for someone who plans to use an ink - exploring its behavior and finding the best (of their own) pens and papers for it.  In my case, I'm just documenting my limited data set and calling it good.  I actually don't care about dry time, and none of these inks have bothered me in actual use, even on TR paper - probably because I use blotting paper for bookmarks.

 That makes sense!

As long as you don't use cheeseburgers 🤣

[LizEF]

1 hour ago, Lupine said:

Thank you! This one of my newest inks. I'm very happy with it. I've only used it in a BB so far.  Lots of shading. Glad to see it's so usable in an EF.

You're very welcome.  I'll bet that BB shows lots of the nuances of this ink's colors.

[LizEF]

13 minutes ago, yazeh said:

As long as you don't use cheeseburgers 🤣

That would be a waste of a perfectly good cheeseburger!

[InesF]

Hi @LizEF, thank you for this review, for the story 😄 , for the chromatogram (very interesting!), for the microscopy (the inks seems to crawl along the paper fibres) and for your statements in the responses.

 

There are some serious considerations. Dry time doesn't matter as long as it is short 😇! 🤫. The eternity factor renders the most interesting ink into a no-go for anything else than pure artist work.

Based on the close-ups I would consider this ink highly interesting. However, I have already another such purple-grey ink I like a lot and that dries long before the black hole area of the Universe will end ... 👩‍🎓

 

PS: I highly appreciate your effort in scanning lines from previous reviews - great work!

[PithyProlix]

Thanks for the useful review! I like what I see ... so now I'm encouraged to try diluting Chopin ... 

[LizEF]

5 hours ago, InesF said:

Hi @LizEF, thank you for this review, for the story 😄 , for the chromatogram (very interesting!), for the microscopy (the inks seems to crawl along the paper fibres) and for your statements in the responses.

You're very welcome!

 

5 hours ago, InesF said:

There are some serious considerations. Dry time doesn't matter as long as it is short 😇! 🤫. The eternity factor renders the most interesting ink into a no-go for anything else than pure artist work.

Perhaps, but I believe you've seen that ASD got far less than eternal dry times - his were less than 30 seconds (for Colorverse Bluish Green), where mine were over 2 minutes.  That suggests that one should determine for oneself whether dry times are eternal or just long-ish.  His Rhodia stock is different from mine (2020 for him, sometime between 2016 and 2018 for me), and there's no telling what other differences may account for this discrepancy.  In short, I'd hate for someone to forego and ink they like just because I experienced dry times longer than 2 minutes.

 

5 hours ago, InesF said:

Based on the close-ups I would consider this ink highly interesting. However, I have already another such purple-grey ink I like a lot and that dries long before the black hole area of the Universe will end ... 👩‍🎓

 

5 hours ago, InesF said:

PS: I highly appreciate your effort in scanning lines from previous reviews - great work!

Thank you!  I'm enjoying creating a reasonably accurate comparison of line widths.  It's also interesting which inks leave broken lines (or lines with holes in them) and which fill in every nook and cranny in the paper.

[LizEF]

4 hours ago, PithyProlix said:

Thanks for the useful review! I like what I see ... so now I'm encouraged to try diluting Chopin ... 

You're very welcome!  Diluting Chopin may work (though lubrication and flow will suffer).  If you use Tomoe River or another slow-drying paper, that may be the way to go.  If using the current Rhodia stock, or another paper more absorbent than TR, Doldam may not be the risk it appears to be.

[PithyProlix]

6 minutes ago, LizEF said:

You're very welcome!  Diluting Chopin may work (though lubrication and flow will suffer).  If you use Tomoe River or another slow-drying paper, that may be the way to go.  If using the current Rhodia stock, or another paper more absorbent than TR, Doldam may not be the risk it appears to be.

 

Ah, but I have the L'Artisan Pastellier 'Diluant' to perform this magical feat without any major negative impact ...

[LizEF]

19 minutes ago, PithyProlix said:

Ah, but I have the L'Artisan Pastellier 'Diluant' to perform this magical feat without any major negative impact ...

Perfect!   Very nice that some makers offer diluants.

[axialix]

Love the chroma on this one! Nicely done.