Taccia Aoguro
Ink Review #28
*Please note that the scan is the accurate representation of this color.
Overview
The color/properties:
Taccia Aoguro is a dark blue-black ink. It shades with a soft cut in cursive and a crisper, more defined cut when writing in print. It also has a minor dull red sheen that you may see in between shaded and non-shaded areas of the writing. The sheen isn’t the easiest to see, but I noticed it on all of my test pages.
Ink Splat
Droplets
Performance on paper:
Taccia Aoguro is well-behaved on paper. During my tests, I didn’t encounter any bleed-through or feathering on any of the test sheets. Surprisingly, the dry times were mostly average, if not mixed. Still, they almost always managed to dry within 20 seconds or less.
The water resistance is a notch above average. There’s the usual clouding around where the droplets hit, but the remains are dark enough and clear enough to be legible.
Water resistance
Chromatography
Performance in the pen:
The reason that Taccia Aoguro performed so well on paper is because of the abysmal performance it had in the pen. I can barely even say there was a dry flow. There is almost no flow. I’m honestly shocked that it wrote with the needlepoint because with the fine nib, it barely wrote at all. I double-checked the nib multiple times during the test to verify that there was nothing wrong with it, but the results remained the same. The nibs that did work weren’t a lot better: there’s a general lack of lubrication that just made this an unpleasant ink to write with.
To top it off, the cleaning took more effort than it should have, requiring multiple soaks and flushes for the nib units to run clear of ink.
Written on 52 gsm Tomoe River paper (white, 7mm ruling) with a medium nib.
Written on Midori MD paper (cream, 7mm ruling) with a medium nib.
Performance in a pen: 4/10
Performance on paper: 10/10
Color saturation: 7/10
Sheening: 2/10
Shading: 2/10
Dry time: 6.5/10
Water resistance: 5.5/10
Ease of cleaning: 6.5/10
Shimmer: None
My personal thoughts...
At this point, I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to try hundreds of inks. Amongst all of them, there aren’t many that I didn’t care for, and even fewer that I outright hated. All this to say, I just can’t recommend this ink. The performance is so poor that I simply couldn’t find it enjoyable to use. In fact, I found it barely usable at all. I gave it a lot of chances too; I’ve tried Aoguro in plenty of pens in the past with the same results: overwhelming dryness, drying out, and skipping. If it wasn’t for the poor performance, this might have been a decent option because the color isn’t awful, but frankly, there are a lot of excellent blue-black inks out there that make this one not even worth considering. My recommendation is to save yourself the frustration.
Written in a 52 gsm Tomoe River notebook with a Conklin 1898 “Doodle” (medium nib).
More images/info:
Tools and materials used in the writing samples:
A TWSBI Diamond 580 AL with 7 nib units including a Needlepoint grind, EF, F, M, B, 1.1mm stub, and an Architect grind. All nibs are tuned to perform at the same medium wetness.
A Rhodia No16 A5 DotPad
A Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook
A Midori MD A5 Notebook
A 68gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook
A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook
A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook