Why are the Nittaku 3 star premium 40+ poly balls are never in stock?

AndySmith said:

I think you could well be right. It's hard to say without access to someone on the inside, and there are at least 3 different production methods being used with plastic right now - Chinese seamed (imagine that DHS and DF are pretty much the same), Chinese Seamless, Japanese Seamed - so they could all be facing different issues.

As for the orange balls - this drives me absolutely crazy too. The ITTF could have mandated that orange balls were required rather than leaving it up to the manufacturers to decide if/when they should be produced, but they didn't. There could be some technical reason why the plastic can't be coloured (but I can't think of any reason myself). It could be that you can't do an orange production run without staining the equipment in some way, so you have to have a different line for orange balls using different equipment (total guesswork, sounds stupid to me). I know that an orange ball has to go through the ITTF's registration process separately to a white ball, so there could be some time/effort/cost problems in getting that done. Or it could be that no one can make enough white balls anyway and there just isn't time to sort orange out, in which case we're moving too quickly and we shouldn't be forcing adoption of plastic yet.

My big fear is that DHS will produce the first orange plastic ball, which gives clubs a real dilemma. Use a horrible orange ball, or a reasonable white one? Arrrgh. Please XSF/Nittaku - beat them to market.

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