Noodler's Luck of the Draw vs Pilot Blue-Black vs Franklin Christoph Blue 72

I returned from the 2018 Baltimore Pen Show with a new pen and some new inks. The new pen was a Franklin Christoph Model 02 with a steel fine cursive italic nib by Mike Masuyama. Franklin Christoph always sets up your pen at the show and lets you pick an ink to load in it for the first time. I chose the FC Blue 72 (of the Pantone color number) because their web site listed it as water resistant and they sell cartridges in bottles of 40 for a very good price. I figured I would try it out to see if I could find an ink cartridge with a water resistant ink I could use for daily work at the office.

While at the show, Luxury Brands, who represents Noodler's Ink, had a table demoing the show ink from Noodler's called Luck of the Draw. I gave it a try and sort of liked the understated gray-green color. With the teaser that it was one of Noodler's water resistant inks, I bought a bottle from a vendor. Took it home and loaded it into a Pilot Metropolitan with a medium nib.

Meanwhile, I have a Pilot VP fine with a Pilot Blue-Black cartridge on my desk, which I like to have readily available for quick notes. I know the performance of the Pilot Blue-Black from extensive testing and have confidence that anything I write with it will be permanent -- even in a flood. I thought it would be interesting to do a comparison between the three very dissimilar inks.

So, the results of the test is scanned at 1200 dpi into a jpeg and posted below.

The left scan is the original writing on Rhodia Dot Pad 80 gsm paper. This is a high quality paper I would expect the best inks to perform well on.

Of course, all three inks look perfect in the original scan.Pilot Blue-Black is always a well-behaved, easy starter. It dries quickly and has a nice professional color. Never dries on the nib. I find the FC Blue 72 to be a superb ink for office use. I can leave it uncapped for minutes at a time between notes and it never dries. Starts right up. It is even fairly well lubricated and glides onto the paper. I like the color too. Luck of the Draw reminds me of a graphite pencil with B softness. It's a somewhat retro color that really draws my attention. Understated, yet easy to read. This also makes a good office ink.

Well, it's obvious how they held up after the six hour soak in water. The Pilot B-B came through as expected. No surprise there. The Noodler's LOTD is definitely permanent with only a slight amount of dye washing away. The FC Blue 72 was disappointing in that it completely faded away. No trace to be found after six hours in water. It's too bad because I really liked its performance in my pen and on both Rhodia and my office Black 'n Red notebooks. If you don't care about permanence, give Blue 72 a try. It's a very good value for a very well-behaved ink, and the color is beautiful, too.