Robert Oster Sydney Lavender ink review

[A Smug Dill]

I saw 50ml bottles of this ink going on clearance dirt-cheap, with no free shipping on offer but a fixed charge per order irrespective of its contents, so I took a big leap of faith and ordered eight bottles at once on a whim, hoping I'll like the ink. My initial reaction upon seeing it on paper up close was one of disappointment; my writing with it (produced with a very fine nib, of course) looked blue-grey without any violet or purple, and so I hadn't been much inclined to fill any of my pens with it. I've since tried it in nibs I don't really like writing with: Aurora Stub and Oblique (Medium?) nibs, and an 18K gold BB nib I bought also on a whim for a Pelikan M815 Metal-Striped pen I don't enjoy using. It turned out that this ink is quite nuanced, and the violet colour is there but subtle (yet not as subtle as, say, the purple undertone in Sailor Shikiori Chushu). With narrower lines it's difficult to see, but if you look closely enough, it's there, especially when viewed at a slight angle. Alas, my scanner is quite hopeless at picking up the true colour.

 

On to the review:

 

 

 

Colour: The scans of splats done on the Arttec Como Sketch Pad 210gsm and Canson Drawing 220 Pad 220gsm papers present the colour much better than the scans of the writing samples. I've marked out, in the 300dpi scanned image fragment above, two squares that best represent the complexity of what I see across most of the actual writing. For some reason on which I cannot yet zone in, on the odd occasion (say, 1% of the time at a wet-finger-in-the-air estimate), the ink marks will come out just blue-grey without any hint of violet, but that is rare.

Flow and lubrication: Somewhat wet as in watery, coupled with long dry time; not slick at all and provides little lubrication.

Feathering: Not observed on Rhodia DotPad 80g/m² paper, in spite of the ink feeling watery.

Show-through: Negligible on Rhodia DotPad 80g/m² paper when written with a Fine nib; mild when written with a BB nib.

Bleed-through: Short of doing triple passes over the same spot, there was no bleed-through on Rhodia DotPad 80g/m² paper. However, I did observe that on the Canson 220gsm paper, where the ink pooled there is significant bleed-through; but similarly big splats and heavy drops of ink on the Arttec Como 210gsm paper showed no bleed-through. That there are thin, faint blue haloes around the shapes on the Canson paper, while the perimeters dried to a slightly raised and faintly glossy crust on the Arttec paper, suggests that the Canson paper is rather more absorbent.

Composition: From chromatography of the ink, it appears there are two main component dyes, and the turquoise component is keen to leave the pink-magenta component behind entirely if given the opportunity. I think that's why there is that faint blue (or turquoise) halo on the Canson paper, and in fact you'll see a little bit of that where I've done 10 ‘parallel’ vertical lines within a 5mm square area on Rhodia DotPad paper. Where I've inadvertently allowed two or three adjacent lines to touch each other, and gave room for the watery ink to pool across lines, you can see that little bit of blue stand out from the grey. 

Shading: Abundant where the ink marks are not too wet, apparent even when written with a Fine nib, and the transitions from lighter to darker shades are relatively smooth as opposed to demarcated. I've written a page of consecutive lines with deliberately shifting wetness, to show the range of the ink. (Unfortunately, as mentioned before, my scanner is hopeless at picking up the violet colour from that page of writing samples.)

Sheen: None observed. I wouldn't call the raised perimeters (or rim, or crust) of dried excess ink on the Arttec paper sheen, even though they do reflect light in a colour that is different from either violet or blue-grey. If you rub those perimeters hard with the pad of your finger, they'll smear slightly.

Water resistance: You'd still be able to read what was written if the page got wet and you patted it dry quickly; but after being under (a drop, streak, or bath, of) water for 4–5 minutes, the ink marks will be obliterated.

 

 

 

 

Edited October 2, 2021 by A Smug Dill
Embedded link to reviews of Chushu

[LizEF]

Thanks for the review!  I think all the purple inks I've been reviewing lately has been making me like purple!   And some inks need a broader nib to show off - and some need a fat smooth nib to make up for their lack of lubrication.    Either way, I kinda like the color.

[yazeh]

Thanks for an excellent review @A Smug DillMissed your flowing flourishes... good to see them again. Ink reminds me of Scabiosa....

[mizgeorge]

Fantastic review @A Smug Dill - it's been a while since we've been treated to one of these!

 

I have quite a lot of RO inks, and for some reason this is one that's passed under my radar. 

 

I think I rather like it. I'm still preferring lighter inks at the moment, and it's not a shade I'd normally gravitate to, but it's definitely got something. 

 

Thank you - I might not have even considered it otherwise.

[lgsoltek]

Thank you for another great review rich in details! Personally I see no reason to prefer this to Chushu or Hamachidori. 😅

[A Smug Dill]

Thanks everyone.

 

I'd have liked to just do one of my regular lazy reviews for this, but my early writing samples and scans of the pages just didn't present the ink with any sort of fidelity, so I had to explore it a bit more.

 

1 hour ago, lgsoltek said:

I see no reason to prefer this to Chushu or Hamachidori.

 

I also like those inks better, not the least because they're more water-resistant; but I have a whole lot of this ink (even after giving away some) and it came cheap to me, so for some applications of putting pen to paper this will certainly do.

 

 

3 hours ago, mizgeorge said:

I have quite a lot of RO inks, and for some reason this is one that's passed under my radar. 

…‹snip›…

Thank you - I might not have even considered it otherwise.

 

Oh? Did you mean the flower and not the ink, then, when you wrote what's below back in May?

On 5/26/2021 at 10:59 PM, mizgeorge said:

I'm well jell over that one! And I love Sydney Lavender...

[austollie]

Hi Smug Dill,

 

Nice review.  I really appreciate the effort that you make to present the features of the ink in detail, particularly if the scanner is introducing colour variations.

 

I have to say that I quite like the colour, even if it's more blue-grey than purple.  Having missed out on Lamy Dark Lilac, I bought Diamine Pansy.  That's nice and purple and looks good to me, but I feel self-conscious using it a business setting.  Sydney Lavender seems much more appropriate for office use.

[A Smug Dill]

14 hours ago, yazeh said:

Ink reminds me of Scabiosa....

 

R&K Scabiosa, when dried and ‘cured’, is closer to Robert Oster Claret than it is to Robert Oster Sydney Lavender.

[IlikeInksandIcannotlie]

Your review format's quite nice, seems very comprehensive. 

8 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

Oh? Did you mean the flower and not the ink, then, when you wrote what's below back in May?

Did you just come across that in a thread somewhere, or...

[A Smug Dill]

11 minutes ago, IlikeInksandIcannotlie said:

Did you just come across that in a thread somewhere, or...

 

That was a reply @mizgeorge addressed to me several months ago, so I have some vague recollection of it; but I found it while I was searching for forum posts that mentioned Sydney Lavender, because I couldn't remember how long ago it was that @PithyProlix asked me nicely to review this ink.

[PithyProlix]

4 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

That was a reply @mizgeorge addressed to me several months ago, so I have some vague recollection of it; but I found it while I was searching for forum posts that mentioned Sydney Lavender, because I couldn't remember how long ago it was that @PithyProlix asked me nicely to review this ink.

 

Thanks for the tag and getting my attention!

 

Thank you very much for the beautiful review - I know it's a lot of work and it's truly appreciated. Thanks also for including in the image with the 5 other 'purplish' inks you posted earlier today in the purple thread. 

 

I expected that it would be more like the writing in the first image with the ink splotches, where the purple seems more apparent overall than in the other images, but also with more grey than what I see in the first image. I'm still very intrigued by this ink but perhaps it may need pens more dry than not (and/or some dilution) to make the color appear the way I'd want it - but, still, to my eye the base color still seems to be very, very nice, if sometimes too dark for my tastes. 

 

 

[mizgeorge]

And somewhat embarrassingly, I was thinking of Sydney Darling Harbour back in May. Not sure how my rather addled brain turned a slightly murky green ink into a lavender one, but there you go. I blame what's generally known as the 'difficult' years and poor geography skills.

[ENewton]

I love the purple-grey range, but after years of experimentation to get Oster purple inks to look purple on the page, I am disinclined to another such project.

 

Thank you for giving me a means of enjoying the ink vicariously.

[InesF]

Thank you @A Smug Dill for this comprehensive ink review.

Intense purple inks are always interesting. But I can see some feathering in the magnified parts of your writing samples - may this be an artefact of the scan?

[A Smug Dill]

19 minutes ago, InesF said:

But I can see some feathering in the magnified parts of your writing samples - may this be an artefact of the scan?

 

There's some woolly-ness in the outlines of the ink marks, but keep it mind that this was done with a nib that I've amateurishly reground myself, without the proper skills and equipment to make it as crisp as I like; it's all I could do to make the pen/nib usable. There aren't any well-known and reputable nibmeisters in Australia who can be readily accessed to do a proper job of it. I don't think any ink would make that nib put down completely crisp lines.

 

To truly test for any feathering I'd have to use an Pilot PO nib or Platinum UEF nib in ‘factory condition’, because the manifestation of such would be far more detectable and significant when the ink lines are narrow; but since I only have one of each, and they use proprietary converters — which means I cannot easily move the fill on ink from one pen to another with significant loss in volume and incurring subsequent cleaning work, or in a pen where I can change nibs readily — so I'm not going to use them for ink reviews.

[fireant]

Gorgeous review. Thank you!

[PithyProlix]

On 10/2/2021 at 8:50 PM, PithyProlix said:

I expected that it would be more like the writing in the first image with the ink splotches, where the purple seems more apparent overall than in the other images, but also with more grey than what I see in the first image. I'm still very intrigued by this ink but perhaps it may need pens more dry than not (and/or some dilution) to make the color appear the way I'd want it - but, still, to my eye the base color still seems to be very, very nice, if sometimes too dark for my tastes. 

 

Revisiting. Now I am seeing the purple quite prominently in all the images and I think this is a beautiful ink. Did my eyes change? 

[inkstainedruth]

Just ran across this thread -- and in a timely fashion, at that.  Just got some Robert Oster samples in the mail from Vanness Pens, and this ink was one of them.  So now really looking forward to trying it.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[ENewton]

2 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

Just ran across this thread -- and in a timely fashion, at that.  Just got some Robert Oster samples in the mail from Vanness Pens, and this ink was one of them.  So now really looking forward to trying it.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

Which did you get?  

[inkstainedruth]

Well, besides Sydney Lavender, I got Cherry Blossom and (stupidly) a second sample of Dragon's Night because I forgot I had one I hadn't tried.  Also am trying a new brand for me: Pennonia Tihanya Lila (Tihany Purple).  Then also bought a full bottle of Noodler's Akhmatova (which I'd recently tried) and was surprised by the freebie bottle of Lamy Vibrant Pink that came with the new White and Red Safari (several other vendors were packaging Vibrant ink in with the pen, for Breast Cancer Awareness Month) but I hadn't noticed that Vanness was doing that as well until I opened the box when it came on Friday.  

Of course what have I opened up so far?  The cartridge of Lamy Black that came with the pen....   Because while I have ONE new spare Lamy converter, I still may need another (I found a second converter that might not be long for this world, because I think it's the one that leaked behind the piston head at some point...).

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth