I Think I've Found An Ink I'm Not Pleased With

[Intensity]

I got some Robert Oster Fire & Ice. It has a gorgeous hot pink sheen...but only on Tomoe River paper...and with a dip-pen. On any other paper, and in a fountain pen, it's just a dark turquoise, which I find rather depressing.

 

In a pen with drier flow, Fire and Ice is a gorgeous vivid/bright teal-turquoise. It's my favorite ink: so saturated and cheerful, it's anything but depressing. If you let it sit in a pen for a long time, it becomes more concentrated, and you can see the sheen on other paper too, not just Tomoe River. Of course the base color also becomes darker, more like the base color of Emerald of Chivor.

[LanceSaintPaul]

It is so hard to judge color on photos, it may be complitely different in real life.

 

What I find so different in real life is the difference between the swatches and what actually comes out of a nib. The swatches may show what the ink is capable of, but the line out of the pen is often a smaller & somewhat disappointing subset of the color potential. So the width of the nib & the paper used may alter drastically what you see.

 

Then the color depicted in a photo or scan, filtered through the operating system & browser are another potential variance.

 

So it pays to see for yourself.

[ENewton]

For me, the biggest recent disappointment has been Robert Oster Barossa Grape. I had seen some swabs and loved the color, but none of my pens is wet enough to compensate for the dryness and lack of saturation of the ink.

 

At this point, I would never buy an ink on the basis of swatches, or of reviews that show how the ink looks in an especially wet pen.

[Noihvo]