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Lamy

The most interesting thing about Lamy inks in general is the bottles they come in.  The design is clever in two directions, only one of which is externally obvious.  The base of the bottle is a plastic dispenser filled with little paper pen-wipes, so one need not hunt around for the means to clear ink off the section and point at the end of the filling process.  The invisible cleverness lies in a protrustion on the bottom of the glass part of the bottle to which the dispenser clings, which on the inside acts as a well to ensure the point is sufficiently submerged for a good filling even when the bottle is very nearly empty.

Apart from the bottle, Lamy inks are little more than good general purpose inks, without any extremities of behaviour to cause comment.  This is as much a virtue as it is a vice; while one may not fly into a passion of delight over Lamy inks, one is also not going to become apolpectic with rage.

Examples (note– I’ve not calibrated my scanner, so these are mere approximations of the true colour):

lamy5Black: Not the blackest black that ever made a darkness on a page, but acceptably dark for most people’s concept of “black ink”.  It is also very well-behaved on the paper and doesn’t leave much in the way of residue in a pen.

Blue: The most general of general purpose inks, this would be though of as a school ink in Germany. A pleasant medium blue, it shares with most inks of this colour a tendency to fade somewhat over time.

It’s even better in a flexible pen

Blue-black: The only of Lamy’s colours to evoke any passion amongst users, the bottled version of this ink is of an old-school reactive nature; entirely waterproof once on paper, but somewhat given to depositing residue in the finer channels of a feed.  There is word that Lamy has decided to abandon this formula in favour of a merely dye-based version.  This is probably because too many people have let the stuff dry in a pen and then complained under warranty, but it’s still a shame because it is an ink that sits very well with pens made before 1940.  It is also one of the best inks I know of for writing on loosely-made paper, being almost entirely innocent of feathering.

Green: A fine, relatively vibrant green.

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