I just rescued my new Paasche Talon 3G airbrush from the cold and dark German customs place and wanted to give you my first impressions on it. The brush comes in a nice set, including 3 different sizes of nozzles and needles and aircaps, an air hose, a flat spray aircap and an airbrush holder, which can be installed onto your desk.
The Facts
The Paasche Talon is a gravity feed, dual-action airbrush. It comes with three different nozzle sizes of 2,5mm, 3,8mm and 6,6mm and the cup holds ca. 12 ml of paint. The build quality of the brush is excellent as far as I can tell from the first few hours I spent with it. All in all a solid job. Disassembly is very easy, so you'll have an easy time troubleshooting, should a problem arise.
The Good
The Talon gives you a lot of choice what you want to do with it. Because of the many acessories I can imagine it to be quite the workhorse in the future. Just switch the head and needles, which takes 2 minutes max and you're good to go again.
The Talon seems to behave much better than my Rich RB-2. It is much more forgiving concerning the handling. After a few minutes I was able to do very fine lines which were also very even - something which took me quite a while with my old airbrush.
All in all I would highly recommend this airbrush for a beginner. One feature I especially like is the Needle Stop - just tighten or loosen the screw on the end of the brush and you can set how far the needle will be pulled back. Really awesome, when you want precise and continuous lines.
The Bad
I had some difficulty with the spray pattern of the Talon. Maybe it's just a technique thing, or I have to adapt to the new brush, but on my first tries the pattern seemed very irregular.
The upper line was made with my Rich RB-2, the lower with the 3,8mm setup with the Talon. Notice the granular quality of the Talon - no dealbraker, but definitely something to watch. When I switched to the smaller setup (2,5mm) and moved the airbrush closer to the surface, this got better, so I'm assuming it's just an adaption thing.
The crown cap makes detail work easier, but has one huge drawback. Because the sides of the cap are open, I can no longer use the blowback technique for mixing my paints and cleaning the brush. Also not the end of the world, but inconvenient nonetheless.
The Verdict
The Paasche Talon is an excellent brush, for beginner and advanced airbrusher alike. It is easy to take apart and assemble for cleaning, has many great features and performs very well. I highly recommend this brush for everyone who is looking to get into airbrushing. It may be pricy, but you do get a lot of bang for your buck. And with airbrushing it's always better to buy quality, which will pay off in the long run because you will use your brush for a long time.
I hope this review may be helpful to some of you!
As always, enjoy and have fun,
IK-Painter
How did you know which needle and nozzle matched to each other? Did I just flat out miss that in the instructions?
ReplyDeleteThere are small intendations on each part, that correspond with each other. 1,2 and 3 lines, which match on all the parts.
ReplyDelete1 line is the fine, 2 the medium and 3 the large size.
You can find those on the needle, nozzle and cap.
Cheers,
IK-Painter