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A New Line Of Colorful Inks From Hong Kong


bob_hayden

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I ordered some ink from an eBay listing with this title.

 

3D4A 25ml Fountain Pen Ink Painting Drawing Creative Non-Carbon Ink

 

There are ten colors available. I ordered Bordeaux. The price was US$2,66 postpaid which I could not resist because there are not that many inexpensive wine colored inks out there. The ink arrived in about 3.5 weeks with lots of padding on four sides but not on the top or bottom. Still it survived. The bottle is cube-shaped glass with a plastic top. It looks pretty classy -- more so than most of the inks bottles from the major pen companies. They seem to be aimed at a Western market with only two Chinese characters on the label. The brand (not mentioned in the eBay listing) is Karkos. This is printed on the label and molded into the bottom of the glass bottle which suggests these folks are serious about selling ink.

 

Beneath the cap is a plastic stopper. I hope this helps with the recurring problem of leakage with ink shipped from Asia. I have seen this design before, I think on Glare ink. Whatever its merits, I find it impossible to remove the stopper without getting ink all over my fingers. My first disappointment was that my fingers and the paper towel I used to clean up the mess were both Mercurochrome color. Writing with a F nib pen looked like many European red inks -- a bit orange. Saturation was very low. On drying the ink looked somewhere between red and pink. The orange seemed gone but under no circumstances did I see any hint of blue, purple, maroon, etc. The ink had a watery appearance that reminded me of the very cheap ink in Hero 359 cartridges sold under various brand names including CHREN and AIHAO. My impression is of very cheap ink nicely packaged. I had a couple other colors in my eBay watch list but I'll be deleting those, mainly because this bottle was nowhere near the promised color.

Edited by bob_hayden
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There was a time when HongKongers liked drinking their first growths on the rocks, or mixed with 7Up/Sprite... or worse, Coke :ninja:

 

Perhaps the watered down Bordeaux is their idea of the colour intended. :P

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took a peek at fleaBay listings... some listing pics suggest usage for watercolour/washes

 

Yeah the Bordeaux don't look much different to Red or Pink

 

The brown looks dark nearly black

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We might soon be able to order ink from the moon or mars, which -- after working out the cost for shipping -- still amounts to less than the cost of a new MB right outta your store. Aside from that, you have just reminded me of the great Hero 232 I once ordered. Thanks.

Life is too short to drink bad wine (Goethe)

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Thank you!

Fountain pens are my preferred COLOR DELIVERY SYSTEM (in part because crayons melt in Las Vegas).

Create a Ghostly Avatar and I'll send you a letter. Check out some Ink comparisons: The Great PPS Comparison 

Don't know where to start?  Look at the Inky Topics O'day.  Then, see inks sorted by color: Blue Purple Brown Red Green Dark Green Orange Black Pinks Yellows Blue-Blacks Grey/Gray UVInks Turquoise/Teal MURKY

 

 

 

 

 

 

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  • 1 year later...

These have recently reappeared in plainer 30 ml bottles for $1.88 postpaid under the title

 

10 Rich Bright Colours Fountain Pen Ink 30ml In Glass Bottle

 

The price is hard to beat!

Edited by bob_hayden
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The reappearance of this brand in larger bottles at a lower price prompted me to dig out the bottle I bought back when. It's under test in an old Wing Sung 840 where it seems to be behaving but feels dry and unlubricated. Since I don't care much for the faded color I thought I would try adding some Jinhao Bluish Violet to see if I could get closer to Bordeaux. I could not but I got a light purple tending toward maroon mixing 1:1. I find that much more attractive than the original. I had intended to devote 10 of the 25 ml of the Krakos to my experiment, but there wasn't that much left in the bottle! I believe I filled one pen when the ink arrived and the 840 the other day. I am estimating the bottle held roughly half the advertised amount. Well, it was a nice looking bottle.

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  • 3 weeks later...

The reappearance of this brand in larger bottles at a lower price prompted me to dig out the bottle I bought back when. It's under test in an old Wing Sung 840 where it seems to be behaving but feels dry and unlubricated. Since I don't care much for the faded color I thought I would try adding some Jinhao Bluish Violet to see if I could get closer to Bordeaux. I could not but I got a light purple tending toward maroon mixing 1:1. I find that much more attractive than the original. I had intended to devote 10 of the 25 ml of the Krakos to my experiment, but there wasn't that much left in the bottle! I believe I filled one pen when the ink arrived and the 840 the other day. I am estimating the bottle held roughly half the advertised amount. Well, it was a nice looking bottle.

 

Since you have the empty bottle why not try measuring its capacity using water? I assume you have some sort of measuring cup or something that could measure an amount of liquid. Might be good to let everyone know just how much ink Krakos can get into one of their bottles.

On a sacred quest for the perfect blue ink mixture!

ink stained wretch filling inkwell

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I did not empty the bottle. And I am not sure its capacity would provide a better estimate of what was in there than I gave as there is no record now of how full the bottle was originally. It's probably moot now as this brand seems to be using a different bottle these days.

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  • 1 month later...

I could not resist the $1.88 bottle of ink so I ordered brown. There has been quite a change in packaging! Though the eBay listing makes a big point of this coming in a glass bottle it actually arrived in a plastic one that looks just like the photo in the listing.

 

s-l1600.jpg

 

There are many sellers -- search eBay for

 

10 Rich Bright Colours Fountain Pen Ink

Note that the cap is on crooked. It appears to be very thin aluminum -- similar to caps I have seen on olive oil. It is not very precisely made and tends to cross-thread. However, it appears to not be intended to seal the bottle but rather to hold in place a plastic stopper underneath. It did that well and the bottle arrived without leaks. The fact that it was plastic was indeed an asset as the seller just tossed the bottle in a thinly padded envelope so I question whether a glass bottle would have survived. As it was, the cap had a ding on it. The stopper was difficult to extract and tended to get ink on your hands as you tried. On my bottle the label was crooked and appeared to have been applied after another label had been only partially removed. While the previous glass bottle seemed quite classy, the current presentation shouts "CHEAP".

 

Now for the good news. I did not try to measure the amount of ink in this bottle but the bottle itself looks quite chunky compared to Diamine's 30 ml bottles. Hence I am willing to trust I am getting full measure, and the bottle seemed well-filled. Inserting a nib into the opening immediately brought ink to the edge of the opening where it threatened to spill over. The opening is rather narrow and may be too small for some pens to get inside. Once in a pen, the ink wrote quite well. The scan looks quite accurate on my monitor. I see a medium brown with some grey. There was a touch of yellow in real life. The overall impression was quite conservative and we might call this "Business Brown". I saw more shading than the scan shows. I included the entire page from my notebook because there were two other browns there for comparison. For those the scan shows more red than I saw in real life. The shading of the Diamine ink is less than the actual but still visible. FWIW the other colors on the page are accurate except that the Levenger black is faded.

 

Current prices for these inks are up about a dollar since I ordered two months ago. (Shipping from China seems even slower than usual these days.) The obvious comparison might be the 30 ml plastic bottles form Diamine. Their US price is now about four times what this ink costs, though of course Diamine offers far more colors. Comparison could also be made with the inexpensive Hero inks, but those come in only the usual four "school/office" colors. I think these inks are a real find for colors like brown, green or turquoise at bargain prices.

 

 

http://statland.org/PenPix/KarkosBrown.png

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  • 1 month later...

I just received green and orange. Both are light and bright and a bit dry. The green is quite cheery and legible. The orange is near fluorescent but too light for anything longer than a tweet. The scanhttp://statland.org/PenPix/Scan30001.JPGner I have been using for years has died and I am not too happy with the scan I got on another unit. The green is close but not as bright as the real thing but the orange much too dark and dull. Many orange inks are too light to be practical so I was not too disappointed here. I really like the green. I need to try these in broader, wetter nibs and also try adding a bit of dishwashing detergent. I had no trouble with skipping but the pens kept feeling like they were running out of ink.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I tried some more colors. Noting other colors were dry, this time I put a drop of Dawn dish washing detergent in about an ounce of distilled water and added four drops of the mixture to each color. Only 1.5 out of six were then dry. I used yet another scanner and was happy with the results. Overall I see these inks as competitive with the lines from pen manufacturers at a fraction of the price.

 

Black

 

Middle of the road black.

 

"Turquoise"

 

A very nice light blue but too light for more than a short note. Calling it Turquoise is a stretch.

 

Violet

 

A nice middle-of-the-road violet -- fairly dark/saturated.

 

Hot Pink

 

I did not take its temperature but this is one of the most legible pinks I have seen.

 

Blue

 

Quite saturated and bordering on blue-black.

 

"Red"

 

Looks orange to me. Orange inks also tend to have legibility issues but this one does not.

 

http://statland.org/PenPix/Karkos6.jpg

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