In Advance, as always, I did not buy these inks, I was given a few
small sample bottles in return for an honest review.
The Super 5 fountain pen I tried a while ago was an interesting piece
of kit, something that performed above its cost and proved to be a pen that I’m
going to continue using for quite some time.
When I got samples of all the different ink colours, it has to be said
that I wasn’t sure if I was going to like all of them.
The first curiosity was the naming of them, like the Super 5 itself,
the names were a curiosity. I have
samples of Dormstadt (Black), Frankfurt (Grey), Delhi (Orange), Dublin (Green),
Atlantic (Blue), and Australia (Red), and while some of those names I feel are
appropriate to the colour, some of them (Frankfurt?) I couldn’t quite
reconcile.
That said, it’s all about the ink, not the name of it, so I took a dip
pen and set to. The inks are very thick,
very strong colours, but they flow at the speed of a normal fountain pen ink. I’m not sure that I’d trust them not to glue
up my finer nibs, but I think they’d be good in a broader nib, where colours as
rich as these would be best to flourish.
All the inks were very wet, some moreso than others, and it was
difficult to differentiate with some of the colours when writing with the nibs
I normally do, which is why I’ve included a swipe of the ink colours beneath
the writing. All of them take a while to
dry on good fountain pen paper. On worse
quality paper, there is still very little feathering with the ink, and the
colours are vibrant on whatever paper you use.
Writing samples of all six colours, all written on Izods dark star
collection paper (which I’ll be reviewing at a later point) for
comparison. The inks aren’t the cheapest
I’ve seen, but they are mixed by Rohrer and Klinger, they’re waterproof, and
the colours are excellent. The thing for
me here is whether or not they’re in range of the inks I normally use and if
I’d consider using them over the regulars.
Well, my regulars are Heart of Darkness and various diamines, so they
don’t compete with HoD on blackness, and they’re nowhere near Diamine on price,
so it’s unlikely that I’ll be going back for more, but they are interesting,
and they’d make for excellent calligraphy if you found the right nib for them.
