Reviews by Shifu

Hey guys,
I have decided to write a review on a blade I like very much but do not longer play. So the Nittaku Violin is just beautiful, it looks really nice, especially the outer ply and its quality is just amazing. What I liked was how easy it was to impart spin, the blade is super flexy on slow opening loops and you can't really not bring the ball on the table with it.
The flex did however create some problems for shots I put a lot of power into: The strong flex did not give me a lot of control on high impact shots, becoming a bit unstable. This also happened when blocking hard shots, I like the stiffness of a Clipper a lot better for those strokes.
The speed nowadays with the 40+ balls is not that great, I would say it's more like All+ than Off- even and so I can recommend it even for beginners.
The handle was a bit too small for my taste but I could live with that.

All in all a great blade but if you advance and do harder strokes you should probably go for something a bit stiffer nowadays.

After a few years break from table tennis I decided to play again and thought about using a classic rubber to regain my techniques. In general picking Donic Coppa was a good decision, there were some downsides however if you were ever used to playing a Tensor or Glue-effect rubber.

What I really liked about the rubber was it's super grippy topsheet. I could load slow topspins with lots of spin and my opponents had big problems with it. During short game the ruber is easy to play since it plays super linear, it does not have a lot of catapult and predictable. The rubber is not fast but not slow either.

What I had problems with was sometimes getting the ball over the net. The last rubber I used before my break was the Xiom Vega Pro, a rubber a bit similar to Tenergy 05. Those rubbers had a high throw so I could play the topspin more horizontal than vertical. With the Coppa this led to many balls landing in the net. I had to open my blade a lot and move my arm more upwards. This resulted in lower speed and while it had lots of spin, my Topspins sometimes lacked danger for my opponents. The further away from the table, the more this got a problem. For regaining my technique, to stop playing half-hearted topspins, this was good. I had to follow-through every movement and only then I was rewarded with a good ball. My carbon blade probably didn't help a lot there since those don't have a lot of catapult because of their stiffness.
I will probably keep the rubber on my backhand and will move to Tenergy 05 on my forehand since I am much better there.