OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Thanks to a tip from the member Chuck Jordan at TTD, I was able to buy two boxes of the new DHS 3* D40+ balls from this place:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Exclusiv ... 35592.html

I received them in about 10 days and I played with them this evening. I paid $15 for 12 balls. Note, these are the ones that have a picture of Ding Ning on the box. The ones with Ma Long are the older crappy ones. Here is my review:

I already believe that this is the best plastic ball in table tennis right now when everything is considered.

From a playing perspective I actually like them slightly better than the Nittaku Premium!! I never thought I would say that about a Chinese plastic ball!

Surface of the ball looks exactly like Nittaku Premium. The seams are a little larger, though, more like earlier seamed balls from China.

They are absolutely perfectly round.

The static bounce is exactly the same height as Nittaku Premium. If you let the bounces die out on the table, they stop bouncing at exactly the same time the Nittaku does. This is a huge improvement for DHS. None of their earlier plastic balls bounced for crap.

The D40+ have a normal sound on bouncing (this is different from the 1* version).

Spin and speed is very similar to the Nittaku, but the DHS feels a little more solid. My practice partner could not tell the difference from the Nittaku Premium when I switched up on him. More significantly, coach Li Kewai (~2700 player) could tell a slight difference and his opinion is that he preferred the DHS D40+ to the Nittaku Premium, and I shared that opinion, although the difference is very very slight. I think the DHS might be very slightly heavier. There is no accounting for tastes, but I would be really surprised if very many people conclude that the D40+ is significantly worse to play with than Nittaku Premium.

On top of all that, the DHS40+ is cheaper. Also, as DHS stops the production of their previously horrible awful terrible miserable plastic balls, these will probably become the standard, and hopefully other companies will be putting their brands on this ball. It would be a major improvement for the sport. The key will be if DHS can make enough of these D40+ balls to meet the demand and still maintain this level of quality.

This is the best news I have been able to report in a really long time. As for my expertise on this, I think it is extensive. I know the plastic ball situation in detail (more than I know about most other equipment issues). Very early on I completely stopped playing with celluloid balls, and I have tried about every 40+ ball made, and I was the first one on English language TT forums to really push the idea that the seamless balls are decent, and not as bad as the prototypes floating around for awhile might have led us to believe. (At the time the expectation was that they would be really bad). Seamless balls actually have a lot of good properties, especially durability, but I think these new balls by DHS will probably be very bad news for the makers of seamless balls. I doubt once people get their hands on these, especially given the price, that people will want to use seamless very much. The playing properties are superior (by which I mean a lot closer to celluloid) and they are cheaper.

The likelihood as a result is that in the foreseeable future we will have a lot more uniformity of balls, which for the last few years has been a big problem for our sport. If in the future the dominant balls become the D40+ ones made by DHS (possibly sold by many companies) and the Nittaku Premium, we will have returned to a situation where the brand of ball doesn't matter very much (as in celluloid era).

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Butterfly Viscaria Black tag
2.2 mm Nexy Karis M on FH and BH

Thanks Baal, that's great to hear!

Any feel for durability for far?

I can certainly vouch for Baal's expertise in the area. He's done so many extensive test and reviews on the different balls over the last couple of years, that I'm very tempted to nick-name him 'Ball' instead of Baal.

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Putting my money wnere my mouth is, I just ordered 7 boxes of 12.

As I read through my review of the D40+ I realized there is something I need to clarify. I don't actually have any information or knowledge that says that DHS is going to discontinue the crappy awful terrible and unacceptable 40+ balls they have been selling for the last few years (the ones with the Ma Long box). I would hope that in time they will just stop selling those and that all the companies they have been supplying with those same crappy balls will in time adopt the new D40+ ones. I would hope that ITTF will eventually make their approval process sufficiently stringent that the crappy ones won't be able to be sold anymore. But I have no information on what DHS and other companies are planning to do.

The thing that may delay the more general adoption of these balls is how quickly DHS can increase the production capacity of the D40+ to meet the demand. It took Nittaku some time to do this, and it the availability of these D40+ balls to regular people (as opposed to the CNT) has been delayed by almost a year and you still can't buy them from places like TT11.

I have no information on any of that. All I can say is that the D40+ 3* is an outstanding ball and along with the Nittaku Premium should become the standard.

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Butterfly Viscaria Black tag
2.2 mm Nexy Karis M on FH and BH

So, does it mean that a focus on D40+, Nittaku Premium and Xushaofa seamless is the way to go?

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Red is blogging here >> http://ooakforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=30522

Yes, although bear in mind the D40+ and Nittaku are much closer to each other, so if those were the dominant balls we would have more homogeneity which would be good for the sport.

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Butterfly Viscaria Black tag
2.2 mm Nexy Karis M on FH and BH

Have you broken any yet? Do they seem durable?

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Too soon for me to say. Also, I will get accurate weights of the balls today.

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Butterfly Viscaria Black tag
2.2 mm Nexy Karis M on FH and BH

This looks like the first example of a rebranded D40+, from TSP.

http://tsp-yamato.com/tsp/product/ball/detail/?id=851

hat tip to Zeio.

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Butterfly Viscaria Black tag
2.2 mm Nexy Karis M on FH and BH

How would you comment on the opinion of Liu Guoliang relating to "less spin and more speed" in an article linked below:
https://www.tabletennisdaily.co.uk/foru ... astic-Ball!
Is it really a case?

First point to emphasize is that LGL knows more about TT than I do. So anything he says has to be taken extremely seriously. The problem is, he didn't say what he was comparing the D40+ to (at least it wasn't clear in the English language versions of those remarks I have seen).

Here is what I know for sure now. D40+ is a bit on the heavy side, average of 2.76 g in the sample of 6 that I weighed using a laboratory balance. That puts it at the very top of what ITTF currently allows. It is made of the same material as Nittaku Premium (ABS plastic), and bounces identically to that ball (a big improvement over earlier DHS 40+ balls). It makes a slightly higher pitch sound when it bounces compared to Nittaku Premium. Compared to D40+, if anything I would say that Nittaku Premium is SLIGHTLY faster and spinnier, and I attribute it entirely to weight (the Nittkau Premium has an average weight of 2.69 grams, which is at the low end of what ITTF allows). If LGL is comparing the new D40+ ball to the regular DHS 40+ ball, I really can't say. Those earlier DHS 40+ balls are so crappy I simply refuse to play with them, mostly due to fragility and low and inconsistent bounce. (I have tested them, and later when claims were made that they had improved, I tested them again, and they were still terrible). Even DHS knows they are terrible or they wouldn't have invested so much developing this new ball made of ABS plastic (plus they are not stupid and it was obvious). It clearly was not a trivial thing to develop the D40+ because the balls are only now available, a full year later than they had originally planned for. I have no idea whatsoever as to what caused the delay. But why would they bother if they didn't know they needed something better?

It seems that DHS has not adopted the new technology that Nittaku developed to seal the two ball haves together. That may account for part of the lower prices of the D40+.

The D40+ feels nice and solid when you play with it. You can have a lot of fun playing with this ball, just as much as with Nittaku Premium or celluloid. I would say that the difference between the D40+ and a Nittaku Premium is about the same as the differences between some of the ball brands we had in celluloid ball era -- noticeable perhaps, and people will have preferences, but not really enough to matter all that much.

This will probably be very bad news for seamless ball makers. Seamless is a good and durable product, but these D40+ are a lot cheaper (at least at the moment). Nice and round, and fun to play with. Seamless have had a head start getting market penetration, but they do not have friends in high places, and DHS does.

One last thing is to ask, how do we know how much spin we are putting on the ball? Without an ultrahigh speed video camera and motion analysis software, the only way we know is indirectly -- meaning how the ball behaves. Specifically we judge spin by how a ball arcs through the air, how it bounces off the table, how it interacts with our's or our opponent's racket. The thing is, all of those behaviors depend on properties of the ball, and two balls that have exactly the same number of rotations/second will react differently with air, table, and rubber. It depends on ball weight, diameter, and surface texture. Because TT balls are very light and move and spin very fast, even very small differences in weight, surface, and diameter can have pretty significant effects on the ball behavior we use to estimate its spin. Therefore, I am always EXTREMELY skeptical of people's comments that this ball (or rubber or blade, etc.) generates more or less spin. For example, you may be looping your opponent off the table more with rubber x than rubber y, for example, but why? Is it really because your loop had more rotations/second? Maybe but not necessarily, your opponent may have mistimed more, or your ball was landing a bit deeper or shorter, or maybe the ball was moving slightly faster. Same with balls.

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Butterfly Viscaria Black tag
2.2 mm Nexy Karis M on FH and BH

Interesting. No one else has them yet. They've also got some other interesting stuff, like vintage 38mm balls. These are supposedly the original 1966 DHS competition balls:



I imagine "qiu" means "ball"...

Iskandar

Interesting. Info on the page says the material is ABS (like the Butterfly ball?). Is the DHS ball also ABS?

Iskandar

I think Nittaku's Premium Japan-made 40+ balls, not Butterfly's German 40+ balls, were supposed to be ABS. The DHS D40+ are allegedly also ABS.

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"Once you get past a certain threshold, everyone's problems are the same: fortifying your island and hiding the heat signature from your fusion reactor." –Doctor Impossible

Lesser spin compared to Nittaku Premium? Forget this ball, hail the seamless which is, so far, cheaper with better or similar durability.

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Red is blogging here >> http://ooakforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=30522

ttnpp has them also.

In my previous comment I mentioned that the D40+, like the Nittaku Premium, is an ABS ball. The Butterfly G40+ clearly is not.

So far the D40+ seems adequately durable. I haven't broken one yet. Seems to wear more or less similarly to a Nittaku Premium.

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Butterfly Viscaria Black tag
2.2 mm Nexy Karis M on FH and BH