Neon Markers

The folks at Letraset were kind enough to send me a sample pack of their new Neon Markers. I tried them out and I feel they are quality items, though maybe limited to some special purposes.

Basically, the Neon Markers are artistic markers with fluorescent inks. The construction will be very familiar to anyone who has used ProMarkers from Letraset. Only discernible difference is that ProMarkers have small bullet tip on one end and larger chisel tip on the other, whereas Neon Markers have a bullet tip on both ends, one small and other larger.

The idea of fluorescent colours is that the colour appears impossibly bright, as if it was reflecting more light than there is. In fact, the colour is taking in light of a high frequency, such as ultraviolet light, and emitting it on lower frequency, such as yellow light.

The fact that Neon Marker colours react to ultraviolet light makes them especially attractive to situations where there's plenty of such light present. These colours will literally shine in places illuminated with little ordinary light and several blacklight bulbs.

Many of you may have already noticed that this fluorescent property is nothing new: in fact the common highlighter pens contain similar ink. I tried some highlighter pens I have and compared them to these Neon Markers. The colours hues are really similar to each other, but the colours of Neon Markers are clearly more saturated and vibrant than the colours of highlighters.

Here are the Neon Marker colours with some similar colours from the ProMarker range.

The Neon Marker colours in this picture are not too distinctive from what you can achieve with normal marker colours, except for luminous yellow and maybe for radiant orange. In the real life the differences were more visible, but the limited capabilities of the camera and computer monitors dull out the colours. So, if your target is to make something that will be shown on computer screen, the Neon Markers are so-so. Photocopying or ordinary four-colour printing will likely bump into same issue.

Here are the same colours when illuminated with a small ultraviolet torch.

 In ultraviolet light the Neon Markers really come to life, except for volt blue. That one just seems to have very little fluorescent properties and is almost the same colour as sky blue from ProMarker range. My camera seems to have somewhat freaked out with the colours in the picture illuminated with ultraviolet light, but you can still see the main point: the Neon Marker colours shine while other colours seem to become dull and dark in comparison to them.

So, to recap: these markers are so-so when the result is reproduced on computer screen. They are a lot better when people can see the original drawing you made. And when the original drawing is displayed under ultraviolet light aka. blacklight, that's when these markers work the best.