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 has a minor red sheen, but it’s dull and it can be difficult to see. I did, however, notice the sheening on all of my test pages. To be honest, if you don’t want this ink to sheen, I don’t even know what to recommend. For reasons we’ll get to in a moment, I don’t think this ink would work very well from a drier pen to even try it. Your only option is sheen. It’s a sheening ink.
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.
A closer look at the minor red sheen
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.
Value/cost per ml:
As of writing, Taccia Aoguro sells for $15 for a 40ml bottle from most US retailers, making it roughly $0.32 cents per ml
The bottle/packaging:
Aoguro comes in the standard Taccia bottle. The design is simple but elegant and reasonably functional. The glass presents the ink inside with excellent clarity, and the cap is large and easy to remove. The opening is large enough to get just about any pen into it for filling. When the level gets low enough, it should be easy enough to fill from a pipette or syringe. The Bottle is wide, so it feels stable, but for some reason — and I really can’t put my finger on it — whenever I open the bottle, I feel like any wrong movement will cause the ink to spill everywhere. I suspect that it’s because it has a wide opening, but also a relatively short neck.
Score: 49/70
Price per ml: 7/10
Performance in a pen: 2/10
Performance on paper: 10/10
Color saturation: 6/10
Sheening: 2/10
Shading: 1/10
Dry time: 6/10
Water resistance: 3/10
Ease of cleaning: 6.5/10
Bottle form: 3/5
Bottle function: 2.5/5
*Only 70 of the 100 available points are required for an outstanding score.My personal thoughts...
I really wasn’t looking forward to writing this review.
At this point, I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to try hundreds of inks. Amongst all of them, there have been few that I didn’t care for, and even fewer that I outright hated. I hate to say it, but I just can’t recommend this ink. The performance is so poor it’s just not enjoyable to use. It’s barely usable at all. And I knew this was going to happen. 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, but frankly, there are a lot of excellent blue-black inks out there that make this one not even worth considering. Save yourself the frustration.
Written with a Cross Century II (18k medium)
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 68gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook
A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook
A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook