Lamy blue/black review

This is a brief handwritten review of Lamy blue/black, from the 50ml bottle. The reason to do this review now, is that it seems the ink was reformulated recently. The new ink is not an iron gall one anymore, so this would be the moment to grab an old bottle from the store shelves!

As an alternative, you could buy the Akkerman iron gall ink (I don't have that one yet, but plan to buy it next week).

Most important conclusion; after it has dried complety, this ink is very much water resistant. I have not tested how light fast it is in the long term.

This ink needs a wet writing fountain pen. Flow is decent, not great, and lubrication is average only. There is some shading, and the color is a classic blue/black. I like the color better than Quink blue/black (not included in the writing sample), and even better than the greyish Pelikan blue/black.

I think it was reformulated well over a year ago so the chances of finding an old bottle would be slim. I'm happy my two bottles are the iron gall version. I love the regular blue for an everyday ink, it is so well-behaved on paper and flows very well in almost every application.

The old blue-black is definitely a dry ink as you mentioned and is a wonderful solution to an overly wet writer; I wonder what the new stuff is like. Thanks for the nice review.

Updated

Indeed, it was reformulated in 2012. Montblanc blue-black, which is very similar, was also discontinued, unfortunately.

I think people don't write enough anymore to use even the modern iron gall inks safely

Montblanc replaced the German blue-black with the Midnight blue (Austrian) which was a permanent iron gall based ink, a great product. Now I understand it has very recently been reformulated and is not iron gall. Look on the bottom of the box to see the difference -- the IG shows permanent. Get it while you can!

You're probably right, folks don't use it enough, the pen suffers.

Great review! Thanks for the info. I wonder if someone has the new formulation and we can do a 1:1 comparison?

Cheers,

M.