Question about H3Neo

Colin Ksh said:

Which one do you prefer the neo or non-neos h3 prov BS?

May I know why as well. Thanks in advance

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I use Neo OS Prov boosted and recently tried Neo BS NONboosted on a X5 and I was truly impressed by the nice feeling and the (totally unexpected) speed

Colin Ksh said:

I see. Thanks sir🙌
There’s a lot new for me since it’ll be my very first time using Chinese rubber. I’ve always wanted to try h3 rubbers since it’s well known but because of the naming schemes and rubber coming in varieties I couldn’t decide myself what to get. I target the provincial cuz it’s smth between commercial and national and the cost is also pretty fair that it’s somewhere in the range of price that I could afford. I’ve ready some post and forums about h3 rubbers and I have to say I really find those useful. Should I get the commercial h3 neo and the Haifu booster( non-national) or should I just get the prov h3 neo BS. The first set(h3 neo commercial + Haifu booster) will cost almost the same as a single pair of h3 neo prov BS.
Any suggestion pls. Btw even if I do play, I’ll be able to just play about twice a week due to school and stuffs.
And what’s the difference between neo and non neo despite the one being factory boosted and the other not. Are they also different in sponge, topsheet quality, durability and so on.

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Tango K said:

I would get the commercial & booster. You will mostly eventually try the booster anw. Ppl keep saying you may not need booster, ignoring the fact that they are advising a guy who has never tried. You may in the end not like it but you would try it first, especially if you are young 😆

the provincial is another story. Its quality is far ahead of commercial. But you don’t know if you actually like H3 anw. You are talking to a bunch of H3 fanboys so you’ll feel like you will be in the same club but reality is you do not know just yet.

also it’s a lot easier to, say, put 5 layers of boosters onto a commercial and trash it than to do the same on a presumably more “precious” provincial.


to stress the point, I’m the only H3 user in 2 clubs, 1 of them is probably the largest in London! It’s pickier than you think.

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I agree with Tango - I have had great success with H3 Neo commercial and Haifu booster - in fact I found it better than H3 Pro (non Neo) with booster. I have also got a sheet of Neo Pro blue sponge to try next - will also apply 3-4 booster layers. For me, even the Neo is still way too slow and dead feeling without boosting - but with it, despite still requiring a lot of commitment to a stroke - it's very fast and powerful.

Kolev said:

I use Neo OS Prov boosted and recently tried Neo BS NONboosted on a X5 and I was truly impressed by the nice feeling and the (totally unexpected) speed

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That's really interesting - so you found Neo Provinvcial BS to be much faster than OS pro?

What sponge hardness were you/are you using?

Tango K said:

I would get the commercial & booster. You will mostly eventually try the booster anw. Ppl keep saying you may not need booster, ignoring the fact that they are advising a guy who has never tried. You may in the end not like it but you would try it first, especially if you are young 😆

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Colin Ksh said:

Which one do you prefer the neo or non-neos h3 prov BS?

May I know why as well. Thanks in advance

Click to expand...

I prefer the National Blue Sponge Boosted lol

Btw, someone on Bilibili.com did a blind test of H3 Neo boosted with one layer of Haifu, to see if they can tell which is which, the results are very interesting.

So apparently I did remember some of the details wrong, here's the link to the video https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13L411V7qc?p=1

In the video, they used three blades for the test, #1 has provincial H3, #2 has national H3, and #3 has commercial H3, all H3 was boosted with one layer of Haifu National Black booster. There are four testers in total, Luo, Liu, Yu, and coach Baozi. Coach Baozi was a former provincial player for Shanxi province, everyone else had training with provincial teams, and have been teaching table tennis at different clubs (Liu was a coach for the Scottish national team).

Everyone who tested said #1 felt "dead", the feeling is not as clear and the dwell time isn't as good as the others, while they all have different opinions on the other two.

So in conclusion, there is definitely a difference among the different versions, just that it might not match what you expect. The funny thing is, everyone in the video thought the provincial h3 is the commercial version, making the commercial H3 the biggest winner lol. But also, blue sponge is only available on provincial and national H3's, so take your pick

Attitude said:

Sry but i have to strongly disagree with several opinions mentioned in this thread. I would have stepped in earlier but i lacked the time to check the forum.
So here we go now.

1. Applying glue before booster:
As mentioned here and in several other posts on this site, glueing first do more damage than good. Glueing creates an uneven surface in which you will the booster to spread unevenly which will result is tremendous different outcomes everytime you boost and on every spot on your rubber. Especially if you boost with a product that is especially made for this purpose it makes no sense to think there is glue needed in the first place.
There are many more reasons not to do this, mentioned in posted thread.

2. Neo-version is a different rubber
That information is disproven by DHS itself. Topsheet and rubber are the same. The only difference is the tuning effect mentioned by several people here which helps using the rubber without booster straight out of the "box". If you are playing often and hard enough AND are not that sensitive about some changing characteristics you could play with it even without boosting it after some months but that highly depends on the player and how they play.
BS and OS on the other hand are different rubbers.

@Michael Zhuang: Your problem with the rubber itself seems to be definitly more of a problem with your technique/strength. And i can relate that especially on backhand. If you watch closely slowmotion backhand movement of Ma Long after 2019 you can see how hard and upwards he hits every backhand shot. That requires some serious training in many aspects of your game. I personally gave up on that, becaus the Hurricane 3 has a quite lower throw for a typical backhand rubber and i cant work with that, so i switched to Hurricane 8 boosted/Yasaka Rakza Z (last one thanks to several tips from players on this forum).
For FH it is much simpler to hit harder so it is easier to make use of such a rubber. I saw many player with the same experience as you had with this rubber, and everyone of them were hitting too weak as if they had a tensor on their FH. That will never work.

So before it escalates and nobody wanna read that, i put a stop here^^

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Very well said. I learnt how to use boosters a few years ago after watching a few tutorial videos made by pingpangwang.com, they also manufacture (or collaborate with other TT companies such as Yinhe, Sanwei, 729) all kinds of table tennis related equipment, including boosters and rubbers, so I just followed their way: glue-booster-glue. But I think I'll switch my way of boosting to put the booster on first now, as you mentioned that booster dissolves a little bit of the glue, which I had questioned about but didn't find an answer to, and it worked for me pretty well so I didn't really care too much about it.

Btw, I find looping downspins with H3 on the backhand pretty easy, maybe it's because my coach was a former Chinese provincial player, and he taught me the proper style to use tacky rubbers. Also, I have a friend who was a provincial player for the Hebei province, he made the cut to go train with the Chinese national team, but sadly didn't make the final cut to join the national team due to being "too naughty". I took a few slo-mo videos of him coaching us when he visited back in 2019. I'll see if I can get his permission to post those here as I think it'll benefit a lot of people.

DukeGaGa said:

Very well said. I learnt how to use boosters a few years ago after watching a few tutorial videos made by pingpangwang.com, they also manufacture (or collaborate with other TT companies such as Yinhe, Sanwei, 729) all kinds of table tennis related equipment, including boosters and rubbers, so I just followed their way: glue-booster-glue. But I think I'll switch my way of boosting to put the booster on first now, as you mentioned that booster dissolves a little bit of the glue, which I had questioned about but didn't find an answer to, and it worked for me pretty well so I didn't really care too much about it.

Btw, I find looping downspins with H3 on the backhand pretty easy, maybe it's because my coach was a former Chinese provincial player, and he taught me the proper style to use tacky rubbers. Also, I have a friend who was a provincial player for the Hebei province, he made the cut to go train with the Chinese national team, but sadly didn't make the final cut to join the national team due to being "too naughty". I took a few slo-mo videos of him coaching us when he visited back in 2019. I'll see if I can get his permission to post those here as I think it'll benefit a lot of people.

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Yeah i learned it the same way. Several youtube tutorials using this receipt too. At some point i did have some issues with my results though.
I am boosting Hurricane 8 and 3 (non neo) on a regular basis now and have no issue without the gluelayer. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that you might not need the same amount of booster without the glue, because the rubber will react harder and faster without the glue.
For example i cant use 3 layers of Falco Tempo Long booster now but do have identical results with just 2 layers. AND i never had bubbling-issues with it - at least not with OS i must add.
Not using BS anymore because of the price. It does have some benefits especially in terms of spin imo, but the difference is too little to matter. My results with OS provincial are good as they are^^

Yeah it is defnitly the technique, that is out of the question. But learning the technique for equipment is not what equipment is for imo - it is supposed to be the other way around as long as you have at least kind of a technique. But as you can see in the video thread i have some kind of bh-skills

Attitude said:

Yeah i learned it the same way. Several youtube tutorials using this receipt too. At some point i did have some issues with my results though.
I am boosting Hurricane 8 and 3 (non neo) on a regular basis now and have no issue without the gluelayer. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that you might not need the same amount of booster without the glue, because the rubber will react harder and faster without the glue.
For example i cant use 3 layers of Falco Tempo Long booster now but do have identical results with just 2 layers. AND i never had bubbling-issues with it - at least not with OS i must add.
Not using BS anymore because of the price. It does have some benefits especially in terms of spin imo, but the difference is too little to matter. My results with OS provincial are good as they are^^

Click to expand...

Attitude said:

Yeah i learned it the same way. Several youtube tutorials using this receipt too. At some point i did have some issues with my results though.
I am boosting Hurricane 8 and 3 (non neo) on a regular basis now and have no issue without the gluelayer. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that you might not need the same amount of booster without the glue, because the rubber will react harder and faster without the glue.
For example i cant use 3 layers of Falco Tempo Long booster now but do have identical results with just 2 layers. AND i never had bubbling-issues with it - at least not with OS i must add.
Not using BS anymore because of the price. It does have some benefits especially in terms of spin imo, but the difference is too little to matter. My results with OS provincial are good as they are^^

Yeah it is defnitly the technique, that is out of the question. But learning the technique for equipment is not what equipment is for imo - it is supposed to be the other way around as long as you have at least kind of a technique. But as you can see in the video thread i have some kind of bh-skills

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Yep, that's what those video tutorial say "put 1-2 layers of glue before the booster, this will make the boosting effect last a little longer due to the glue layers acting as a barrier to slow down the penetration of booster".

I'll have to go find your videos then.

Btw, as I said in previous comments, booster is just what we call it or in Chinese "膨胀油". However, if you read the product name on Haifu Boosters, the Chinese actually says "粘合剂", which basically translates to "glue", it also says "solubility bond" on the bottle. 🤔 So technically it's not illegal to use it as per ITTF's rules, as in if it doesn't have VOC problems, then it's fine.

latej said:

For me the trouble with boosting is not the boosting - i.e. putting oil on the rubber - itself, but rather the glue removal. And my impression is that if I put booster directly on the sponge, then later when I am removing the glue, there is more of the oil residue on the sponge and it is less pleasant to remove. I often end up with blasters on my right thumb. So now I rather put 5 layers of glue, considering 6. I am still not quite there yet. I am aware some people are there, I am not there yet

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latej said:

For me the trouble with boosting is not the boosting - i.e. putting oil on the rubber - itself, but rather the glue removal. And my impression is that if I put booster directly on the sponge, then later when I am removing the glue, there is more of the oil residue on the sponge and it is less pleasant to remove. I often end up with blasters on my right thumb. So now I rather put 5 layers of glue, considering 6. I am still not quite there yet. I am aware some people are there, I am not there yet

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Had the same issue with or without the glue layer before boosting.
That changed the moment i started putting 2 decent layers of DHS no. 15 on the rubber and another one on the blade. This is the least required if you glue a boosted rubber in a still curled state.

If you use a very thing glue you need definitly more layers. Even more so if you brush those layers more thin.

DukeGaGa said:

Btw, as I said in previous comments, booster is just what we call it or in Chinese "膨胀油". However, if you read the product name on Haifu Boosters, the Chinese actually says "粘合剂", which basically translates to "glue", it also says "solubility bond" on the bottle. 🤔 So technically it's not illegal to use it as per ITTF's rules, as in if it doesn't have VOC problems, then it's fine.

Hmm, it's weird that you have booster residue when removing the glue. Also, when you say "residue" do you mean still wet? But if you're having blister problems on your thumb, maybe next time when you peel off the glue, save the bits and roll it into a small ball, it's really helpful to just use that instead of your thumb to scrape. Or if you're like me, you can buy one of these, https://shop.butterflyonline.com/glue-remover . It's pretty good at what it claims.

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Imo booster is not illegal either way. But that discussion is redundant too, because ITTF doesnt put any effort in finding a way to ban boosting.

Hm, i actually stopped using rubberremains or balls for that purpose because i damage the sponge with it everytime. It always rips off some pieces of the sponge with the glue. That glue remover seems interesting though.

Attitude said:

Sry but i have to strongly disagree with several opinions mentioned in this thread. I would have stepped in earlier but i lacked the time to check the forum.
So here we go now.

1. Applying glue before booster:
As mentioned here and in several other posts on this site, glueing first do more damage than good. Glueing creates an uneven surface in which you will the booster to spread unevenly which will result is tremendous different outcomes everytime you boost and on every spot on your rubber. Especially if you boost with a product that is especially made for this purpose it makes no sense to think there is glue needed in the first place.
There are many more reasons not to do this, mentioned in posted thread.

2. Neo-version is a different rubber
That information is disproven by DHS itself. Topsheet and rubber are the same. The only difference is the tuning effect mentioned by several people here which helps using the rubber without booster straight out of the "box". If you are playing often and hard enough AND are not that sensitive about some changing characteristics you could play with it even without boosting it after some months but that highly depends on the player and how they play.
BS and OS on the other hand are different rubbers.

@Michael Zhuang: Your problem with the rubber itself seems to be definitly more of a problem with your technique/strength. And i can relate that especially on backhand. If you watch closely slowmotion backhand movement of Ma Long after 2019 you can see how hard and upwards he hits every backhand shot. That requires some serious training in many aspects of your game. I personally gave up on that, becaus the Hurricane 3 has a quite lower throw for a typical backhand rubber and i cant work with that, so i switched to Hurricane 8 boosted/Yasaka Rakza Z (last one thanks to several tips from players on this forum).
For FH it is much simpler to hit harder so it is easier to make use of such a rubber. I saw many player with the same experience as you had with this rubber, and everyone of them were hitting too weak as if they had a tensor on their FH. That will never work.

So before it escalates and nobody wanna read that, i put a stop here^^

Click to expand...

Attitude said:

Imo booster is not illegal either way. But that discussion is redundant too, because ITTF doesnt put any effort in finding a way to ban boosting.

Hm, i actually stopped using rubberremains or balls for that purpose because i damage the sponge with it everytime. It always rips off some pieces of the sponge with the glue. That glue remover seems interesting though.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I've had problems with glue balls before as well, but only with ESN type rubbers with soft sponge, but then again, I don't have glue removal issues with H3. If you really have a problem with peeling however, maybe try getting a bottle of medium viscosity Revolution No.3, two layers of that and you can take old glue off in a single sheet, at least that's what my experience tells me.

And I was just commenting on the link you linked earlier, and pointing it out to people who says boosters are illegal.

DukeGaGa said:

Hmm, it's weird that you have booster residue when removing the glue. Also, when you say "residue" do you mean still wet?

Click to expand...

But if you're having blister problems on your thumb, maybe next time when you peel off the glue, save the bits and roll it into a small ball, it's really helpful to just use that instead of your thumb to scrape. Or if you're like me, you can buy one of these, https://shop.butterflyonline.com/glue-remover . It's pretty good at what it claims.

Click to expand...

DukeGaGa said:

Yeah, I've had problems with glue balls before as well, but only with ESN type rubbers with soft sponge, but then again, I don't have glue removal issues with H3. If you really have a problem with peeling however, maybe try getting a bottle of medium viscosity Revolution No.3, two layers of that and you can take old glue off in a single sheet, at least that's what my experience tells me.

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Nah no need. I had the issue. But since i put several layers of DHS no. 15 on it im fine. Just peeled a Hurricane 3 free from glue with ease, some hours ago.

@Dipak:
I can kinda relate of what DHS said in an interview about that matter. BS is more lively. I usual translate this with harder to control but harder to anticipate the ball for your opponent.
Overall that resulted for me in some issues to open up with my FH. I missed some more topspins with it i never missed with the OS. They mostly went over the table. The room for error were definitly thinner than with the OS.
The main advantage for me was further away from the table. Reacting against opening topspins especially with countertopspins and strong, active block were played with easy and really fun to experience. With the OS i can do the same, but i have to use more brain and more effort for it to achieve it and not missplay the shot.
Your technique has to be on point in every situation with the BS otherwise this piece of rubber will exploit your errors drastically.

But dont get me wrong the difference is really slim and definitly not worth 20-50€ more depending on which version you chose which is why i stick with the OS provincial.

Wrighty67 said:

That's really interesting - so you found Neo Provinvcial BS to be much faster than OS pro?

What sponge hardness were you/are you using?

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Mine is 39°. The BS I tried was 40 and indeed felt faster on X5. Could've been the blade though..... Will konow for sure when I boost and glue my own Neo BS40