[slowmovintarget]

Regarding Noodler's Ink: Most of his popular inks are fairly consistent. Noodler's Ink Black being by far the most popular. For black inks I prefer Heart of Darkness. It is a deeper, richer black, though it isn't as well-behaved on bad paper.

Noodler's Navy is also very good. (I have many bottles from this brand.)

But if you want a safe-in-any-pen, just works, generally great ink, I'd have to recommend Pilot Blue-Black in the 70ml bottle. The bottle has built-in ink well, so it ensures you get a good fill all the way through the life of the bottle. The ink is middle of the road for wetness (Pilot Iroshizuku inks are wet, this is in the middle, not dry like Robert Oster inks, for example).

[quantgenius]

While I love many Noodler's inks and have many bottles from him too, while this used to be the case, this hasn't been my experience recently. In my experience the inconsistency has if anything gotten worse recently. Worse, the bottle will sometimes contain ink that is different from the label.

I recently bought a bottle of Noodler's Navy to replace a bottle I actually emptied that was bought maybe 5-6 years ago. The ink inside the bottle was almost certainly Noodler's Aircorp Blue Black, which I also have.

In my experience, and based on anecdata from friends who also use fountain pens, Noodler's inconsistency and quality control issues have gotten MUCH worse in the past 2-3 years.

[Alekhine]

It may interest you to know that Noodler's, as far as I know, is a one man operation. It's literally one guy making ink in his shed.