Cheap Paint

In my quest to find the ideal cheap paint for my T98 I have found a few suprises such as the concept that the ball that fits the barrel caliber best will be the most accurate and travel furthest does not seem to hold true in my tests. Also just because two brands of paint wiegh the same, have the same general dimensions and roundness does not nessasarily mean they will perform the same in the air. Most importantly and as expected paintball price is not a good indicator of performance nor are the claims made in advertising.

The Test: Fire 10 rounds of each ball from 90 feet using my AK-47 Tippmann 98 Custom equiped with sawed off 15" J&J ceramic barrel (originally 21") and Co2 pressure regulated at 278 fps using a RAP4 AG1 regulator. I first started with Reaction, one of my favorites on the field. It seemed to do pretty well but a few missed the target all together which I expected since I rarely see much accuracy on the playing field at that distance. If you hit someone at 90 feet it's usually a lucky shot.

Next I tried out the RPS Inertia paintballs since earlier tests rolling them through my J&J barrel showed promising results - well according to the experts the ideal paintball for your barrel is one that rolls through freely but has very little space around the ball and the Inertia's fit my barrel perfectly and the balls were very round. In this case what looked good on paper did not translate to a bullseye. A lot of the shots seemed to float up and away as they approached the target, perhaps due to some unintended spin placed on the ball from the barrel that was a good fit.

Next I reached for the Strykers, expecting a performance similar to the Reaction paint, since they look almost identical to me and the wieght and dimensions are the same. To my suprise all rounds hit the target and many of them dead on. Strykers were by far the most accurate yet.

Next I tried both of the Draxxus varieties that I had and both performed very poorly - similar to the Inertia's. I suspect that the pancake shape of the Draxxus didn't really help.

Next was the pretty blue Visible Impact recreational grade paint. They looked rather pancaked together like the Draxxus, and only performed slightly better.

And finally, the RPS Premium - this isn't really in the cheap paint category, but since I had a bag of them I figure I might as well see how much they blow away the cheap paint. They certainly looked impressive - very round and not much seam to them. In the lab they wieghed in at 3.3 grams so these should carry themselves through the air pretty well and also should be good for blowing branches out of the way in jungle senerios. Well, they did pretty well in the test and they should, at sixteen bucks for 500, but they still did not measure up to the accuracy of the Strykers. So I had to test the Strykers again by pounding the target with 10 more rounds of those  metallic magic red spheres.

#1 Stryker (metallic red)
#2 RPS Premium (orange with blue zebra striping)
#3 Reaction (metallic green)
#4 Visible Impact (recreational grade)
#5 RPS Inertia (green/light green)
#6 Draxxus (maroon color)
#7 Draxxus (50/50 red/yellow)