Posts filed under Ink Reviews

Vinta Ink Heritage Brown Pamana 2018: A Review

(Susan M. Pigott is a fountain pen collector, pen and paperholic, photographer, and professor. You can find more from Susan on her blog Scribalishess.)

To celebrate their one-year anniversary, Vinta Inks created Heritage Brown Pamana Ink. "Pamana" is the Filipino word for "heritage."

Heritage Brown is a brown-orange ink with lots of green sheen. On my Col-o-dex card, you can see the rich brown-orange-ish color in the swab. The writing and splats display the green sheen. In fact, there's so much green sheen that the brown is almost a secondary color.

Vinta Ink Heritage Brown Pamana Col-o-dex

Rhodia Dot Grid paper, which seems to suppress sheen, displays the true brown-orange color of the ink. My photos make it look lighter than it is in person. It's a rich rust color. The ink is wet, with a fairly long dry time, and it is not waterproof.

Chromatography demonstrates that Heritage Brown is comprised of several hues: lavender, lots of pink, orange, lime, and turquoise.

Vinta Ink Heritage Brown Pamana Chromatography

MD Cotton paper with a large ruling nib displays the variations of brown and orange and the thick green sheen. The sheen is evident even in the thinner writing.

Vinta Ink Heritage Brown Pamana MD Cotton

I used Tomoe River Paper (52 gsm) for a writing exercise with a Lamy Vista medium nib. As you would expect, the paper brings out the sheen of the ink but only in bright light does the green dominate the brown. The swab shows both colors.

Vinta Ink Heritage Brown Pamana Tomoe River

Vinta Ink Heritage Brown Pamana Tomoe River Sheen

I wrote out a longer passage using my MD A5 Notebook Journal. This paper really brought out the brown-orange color (especially the orange).

Vinta Ink Heritage Brown Pamana MD Journal

Vinta Ink Heritage Brown Pamana MD Writing

Vinta Heritage Brown Pamana is a terrific ink if you love lots of sheen. The base color is a rich, rusty brown that leans heavily towards orange, but green sheen overwhelms the brown on all of the papers I tested except for Rhodia. The ink performed well and flowed wet and smooth in my Lamy Vista medium nib.

You can purchase this ink from Vanness Pens. It costs $12.50 for a 30ml bottle and $3.10 for a 4ml sample.

(Vanness Pens provided this ink to Pen Addict free of charge for review purposes.)

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Posted on February 19, 2021 by Susan Pigott and filed under Vinta, Ink Reviews.

PenBBS 404 Fountain Pen Ink Review

Let's go ahead and address this right up front. I'm calling PenBBS 404 “Ink Not Found.” As a life long-computer nerd, this is the way. This is the only way. I was even the proud owner of a 404 area code in Atlanta, which is what the real O.G.’s had prior to the proliferation of 770 and 678 prefixes. But Ink Not Found? That's just too good to pass up.

The real sub-name of this ink is Nightfall, which is pretty darn good I must admit. It's a shade of purple reminiscent of dusk, and a color range I'm generally fond of. This one is no exception, and has jumped up quickly into my frequently used inks.

I first snuck it in to my Benu Pen Euphoria review a few months ago. The pen was certainly the star of the review, but that was my first go with 404, and I was smitten.

Nightfall is a light-colored ink, without a deep color saturation you see with many inks. Normally, I prefer that color depth, but something about this ink has grabbed me. It is dark enough to use in wide or narrow nibs, and fun enough to wonder what color it really is.

If you told me this was a grey ink, you wouldn’t get much argument from me. In fact, the most comparable ink it reminds me of is Sailor Chu-shu, which is mostly a grey ink, but leans purple. I’d say 404 is a purple that leans grey.

With this lighter color I do still see some shading. It’s subtle, but when the ink dries I see a mix of light and lighter lines. It looks best with a lot of text on the page. Speaking of drying, it dries ultra fast. There was barely any smear on my five second test on Clairefontaine Triomphe paper. The thinness of the ink helps with that. It’s not a dry ink, but isn’t very lubricated either.

I added PenBBS 404 to a Vanness Pens order on a whim. At $8 for a 15 ml bottle it is a good enough price to take a chance on (I’m not much of an ink sampler,) and you won’t be stuck with a big bottle you won’t use. This is also my first PenBBS ink and review, and I’ll certainly be looking for more to try out soon.

(I purchased this ink at a discount from Vanness Pens.)

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Posted on February 15, 2021 by Brad Dowdy and filed under PenBBS, Ink Reviews.

Robert Oster Carbon Fire Ink Review

(Jeff Abbott is a regular contributor at The Pen Addict. You can find more from Jeff online at Draft Evolution and Twitter.)

Over the past few months, I've definitely had a thing for trying new blue black inks. While I'm not tired of blue blacks, I decided it was time for something a little different. But don't get too excited — this next ink is just a shade or two brighter than the typical blue black. Despite being a close cousin of blue black, Robert Oster Carbon Fire is a spectacular dark blue that has just enough brightness to really lift my spirits.

While going through my ink and swatch collection to find comparable inks to Carbon Fire, I realized that I really don't have much at all in the blue spectrum that falls between bright, happy blue and blue black. Carbon Fire is the perfect dark blue that has an obviously blue hue while also being dark enough to seem "professional." To me, this is the color that most defacto "blue" that comes in gel, ballpoint, or rollerball refills. But, Carbon Fire has some extra qualities that set it apart from regular old navy blue.

For one, I'm a big fan of the amount of shading in this ink. It's not an intense level of shade between different blues, but it's enough that you can see it with small nibs. Of course, the larger the nib, the more pronounced and beautiful the shading becomes. I love an ink that has a good amount of shading, and Carbon Fire really does the trick for me.

Another hidden quality that I've only been able to coax out when using this ink with a medium cursive italic (or anything larger) is a very subtle sheen. It's so subtle and hard to detect that I can't decide if it's more of a red or pink sheen. Despite being subtle, it's somehow quite deliberate when you're looking at the ink color as a whole. It's difficult to describe. The subtle sheen adds a level of intrigue to the ink because you can't quite put your finger on what makes the ink something a bit more than a standard blue ink. It's not shimmery, it's not glossy...what is it?! These were my internal questions while I was testing this ink. Only by holding the paper at the right angle against the light does the sheen show itself for what it is. It hides beneath the navy surface and adds a pleasant je ne sais quoi to an otherwise ordinary ink color.

If you like ink colors that exhibit mysterious qualities, this ink is right up your alley.

Aside from the color, shading, and sheen, this ink is standard fare for Robert Oster. It's not dry, but not too wet. It's smooth when writing and behaves well in the pens I've tried. It dries in a fairly standard 15-20 seconds depending on how large and wet the nib is. I couldn't detect any feathering or bleeding, which is also something I've come to admire with any Robert Oster ink.

I picked up Carbon Fire as a sample because I was intrigued by the name and thought the online swatch example was unique for a dark blue ink. I'm glad I followed the intrigue, because I might have found a new favorite ink.

You can pick up your own bottle of Robert Oster Carbon Fire from your favorite ink retailers for around $17 (Vanness, Pen Chalet, Goldspotand JetPens to name a few).

Membership starts at just $5/month, with a discounted annual option available. To find out more about membership click here and join us!