Where to buy: iZods UK [Here] (one of the few places I have seen stock this ink – particularly in the UK)

Price: £14.50

Bottle size: 50ml

Shading: Some

Sheening: Yes

Recommend?: If you’re into teal inks that lean a little bit closer to green, then this is for you.

I’m on my third cup of coffee. I feel I’m coming down with a cold or something and I’m very very tired. One thing I am not tired of, however, are these Robert Oster inks. Now, a disclaimer – for me, Blue Sea wins between these two inks. I’m very enthusiastic to get a few more of the Oster inks, particularly the blue ones, just to compare them. But this review is of Deep Sea. Yep. It has sea in the name, but I don’t have the brain power right now to think of puns so you’re spared.

Prior to getting these inks from iZods to review, I actually had a small sample of this ink from a pen meet-up I go to each month in London. It was about the time that I first had a sample of Pelikan’s Aquamarine and this is what started my love for teal inks. Deep Sea pushed me ‘deeper’. In comparison to Pelikan’s ink, Deep Sea is a darker teal – much darker. I did get one comment regarding my previous post from someone saying that I should include more comparisons between inks, so I took four swatches of inks I thought were rather similar, though the fourth one is a little far stretched to be ‘similar’. Being a dark ink, I thought it would be useful to highlight it’s more true-teal than lending itself towards green.

In my opinion, the ink sits very nicely between Blue Suede and Aquamarine (well, it sits above and left of respectively, but you get the idea). I included Ebony Green (which I have also reviewed) because it’s a very dark green, and this is a dark teal. When writing with it I was questioning whether it was more green, but this highlights it quite nicely and demonstrates that this is not the case.

Something to point out – of all the inks, when doing the swatches it was Deep Sea which was the wettest. No surprises, Aquamarine was the driest. Noticeably wetter than Private Reserve, but not excessively. I think noticeably is the best word to describe it.

In terms of behaviour, I was very impressed. The ink flows well (it lubricates very nicely) and is easy to clean out of pens. I think we still see Oster inks as the ‘new kid on the block’ (and not for a bad reason, but because the inks have made such a sudden impact on our community) and I would ordinarily be a little cautious of putting them in, say, my Pelikan M800 which is one of my favourite pens if it’s a new brand (the best example would probably be KWZ). From my experience everything has been fine.

Like inside the pen, the ink is also well behaved on paper. On Rhodia it appears a little darker than normal, depending on how you catch it in the light (mainly with ‘ink’, I can definitely remember why I wold consider this as a green-black/teal)

As I said, it looks similar to Blue Suede but a darker shade

On cheaper paper the ink actually appears lighter, which I find interesting. Can see showthrough, but bleedthrough is only really where I’ve pushed down when trying to get line variation.

Pros:

Teal

Wet and flows well

Cons:

Nothing that really makes it wow me

Perhaps a bit too dark for what I’d expect from a teal