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We had our first chance to try out some of the new Xushaofa 40+ seamless balls today. These were the black label in a box of 6 from eacheng. Most of what has been said earlier seemed to hold in my test. Just slightly slower and a little less spin on loops than the celluloid balls. The difference was so little that I think it really got lost most of the time in the randomness of my poor technique. I was never aware of making any conscious effort to change my technique in any of my rally strokes.
The one significant difference I did notice was in the way the balls bit into the table when serving underspin. When waiting for someone to come to the table I often practice hitting the underspin serve that bounces once on my side, once on the other side, and then comes back over the net. It is a way of working on getting good brushing contact spin on my serves. When I tried with the new XSF ball I initially could not get it to go over the net. It bounced and immediately came backwards toward me. I had to significantly lower the trajectory of the serve (to get more forward motion) to make it go over the net. I was really suprised at how low a serve I could hit and still get the ball to jump back over the net. It was so different that I got a celluloid out and tried a few with it to confirm what I thought I was seeing. Sure enough the celluoid balls would not only not come back over the net, they tended to bounce twice on the other side before they started back toward the net when I used the same low serve I used with the XSF balls. For reference this was on a Joola SC 3000 table about 1-2 years old.
When we started playing I saw the same pattern with double bounce underspin serves. Lots of double bounces when the receiver went to loop, but the serve never came off the end of the table. Lots of sudden lunges forward going for pushes of short underspin serves when the balls tended not to come as deep as expected. It did not seem like there was lots more spin on the ball, it just seemed like they checked up much shorter for a given amount of spin than the celluloid balls. I did not notice a significant difference in the way topspin shots or topspin serves behaved.
A couple of the lower rated players 1100-1300 level said that they liked the 40+ better than the regular celluloid ones. It did seem that in warmup rallying they kept the ball on the table a little better than normal. My initial impression was that this happened because the 40+ ball was just enough slower that it acted much like having a little extra topspin. This allowed them to hit a little higher over the net and still get the ball to land without having to hit the heavier topspin that they have trouble doing consistently. The ones who played a little more off the table seemed to get more help from the new 40+ ball than the ones who played close to the table.
We did not break any balls during 2-3 hours of continuous play with the balls.
Mark - USATT rated 1870 (for reference in judging my above comments)
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