Noodler’s Q Eternity Fast Drying Review

Noodlers Q Eternity Bottle Capped

Noodler’s Q Eternity Blue Black (via Goldspot) is part of their fast drying inks that takes pleasure in mocking the questionable Federal Reserve policy of “printing” excess currency in attempts to help stimulate the economy, known as Quantitative Easing.  The spawn of this name for the ink comes from the fact that there seemed to be a never ending current of these QE events that were given names to reflect their chronological occurance over time.  It all started with QE 1 and soon enough you had QE2 and QE3, so the charm of this name being Q “E”ternity pokes fun at the fact that the trend looked like it would never end.  If you are going to print tons of money, you better have some fast drying ink, so thats where Noodler’s Q Eternity comes in.  Enough with my amateur lesson in economics though, lets take a look at the actual ink itself.

Noodlers Q Eternity Bottle Open

A quick peek in the bottle and at the lid of the Noodler’s Q Eternity Blue Black ink gives you an indication of its darker blue nature, which you should come to expect from any ink in the blue black family.  Also, if you haven’t noticed by now, the bottle is a parody of the $100,000 bill with Woodrow Wilson on it who once stated, “I am a most unhappy man.  I have unwittingly ruined my country.” in reference to his signing of the Federal Reserve Act.

Noodlers Q Eternity Black n Red

Noodler’s Q Eternity Blue Black Writing Samples:

My first pass at putting the Noodler’s Q Eternity Blue Black ink to work was in my trusty Black n’ Red notebook (via Amazon) thats usually a good baseline for testing inks.  This ink holds a bit more of a black tone to it but still with plenty of evidence of a nice blue tone as well.  I didn’t notice to much shading with this ink other than with a really close look where you can pick up some slight shifts in tone from black to blue.

Noodlers Q Eternity InkJournal Writing Sample

Here is a closer look at the shading you can see with the Boodler’s Q Eternity Blue Black ink in the InkJournal Swab/Scribble area where I used a cotton swab to smear some ink on the page.  In this photo and the previous photo of the Black n’ Red notebook writing sample you will see the dry times for this ink as well.  I was surprised that it took upwards of 10 seconds each on these papers to dry, which I would consider pretty slow for a fast drying ink targeted at left handed writers.  I can say however that when writing with this ink in my Rhodia Webbie, it actually dried much quicker at around 2-3 seconds.  Just another reminder that ink as well as the paper that you use it on can drastically impact the performance of your ink.  In terms of other performance categories, there was pretty much zero feathering and zero show through with this ink.  I was most impressed by the lack of show through on the paper of the Black n Red notebook with such a dark ink.

Noodlers Q Eternity InkJournal Comparisons

In terms of how this ink compares to some other blue or blue black inks, I’d say its closest (at least from my inventory) to Pelikan’s Edelstein Topaz Ink.  It has those nice dark hints of black that fade subtly into the darker navy blue side of the ink.  Overall I do like the color and some performance aspects of this ink, however on the dry time side which is its key performance differentiator, I think there is some room to improve depending on the paper you are using it with, so you may need to run your own tests based on your favorite medium.  Normally we offer up a disclaimer when we have received a discount or free product, but in this case I wanted to note that I grabbed this Noodler’s Q Eternity Blue Black from our friends at  Goldspot at full price because sometimes I just don’t like to be the guy thats always asking for a discount. 🙂