Hero 202 Blue-Black/dark Blue

[OCArt]

Try Hero 232, a very nice iron gall blue-black. One of my standard inks.

[truthpil]

I'd love to find some 232, but in this part of China selection is quite limited. It's actually easier to find inks from other Chinese brands than to find Hero. Ironically, these inks I just got are the first batch of Hero inks I've found here! Soon I'll post some reviews of the other brands of ink that are more common in this area. They are quite interesting and very nice to use.

[jimrittenhouse]

I'm fond of the cartridge ink for the Hero 359; can anyone tell me which one that is?

[jctsoares]

Recently I bought Hero 204 (black) and 202 which because of the light blue sticker I thought would be blue but in fact it looks grey with just a tiny bit of blue. Nice color and shading but it's not blue, black or blue/black. It's a washed out grey and when I tried it I even thought I must have had a very old bad sample ... 'cause this ain't blue at all! Untill I saw this review and the color looks a lot like mine even though mine shows less blue. I already had 232 blue/black that I like for daily use to compare with. That's a nice very dark blue that turns almost completely black when dry.

 

The reason I at first thought I had a bad old sample is because the washed out grey looks exactly as the ink that came in a long international standard cartridge in a vintage Osmiroid pen. So I'm wondering if old blue ink can turn into grey after many years?

Edited March 26, 2016 by jctsoares

[truthpil]

I'm fond of the cartridge ink for the Hero 359; can anyone tell me which one that is?

 

According to the packaging on a full pack of the cartridges, this is just regular Hero ink in cartridges with the model number of the pen they are made for on the package.

 

Some pens come with a free little bottle of Hero ink (usually blue-black) that is also excellent and some of the smoothest ink I've ever written with. That ink is from Hero's "Dux" (达克斯) line. I just ordered a 50ml bottle of the Dux Blue-Black (it is numbered as 402) and I'll do a comparison to see if there are any differences with Hero's standard 202. I suspect it's the same ink just packaged differently for different markets. The Dux bottle is totally impractical but looks classier than the standard 202 bottle.

 

Here's what the Dux bottles look like:

 

https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.58.5qaovo&id=522936673192&ns=1&abbucket=11#detail

Edited November 12, 2016 by TruthPil