DHS HL5 and W968 catalogue description

Zwill said:

These descriptions are very illusion and magic killing but I think it's probably the truth tho.
In the electronic industry they kinda do the same thing if you all think about it. Let's take an easy example by looking at processors.
Intel or AMD are fabricating the same dies for their actual generation processors. If the parts are flawless they are binned as the high tier and they have all the cores and all the gigahertz and all the moneyhurtz attached. If they have flaws they start to disable cores, functions, lower clockspeed etc and sell them for lower prices. DHS kinda does the same with their balls too so why wouldn't they do the same with their blades and rubbers?

Some DHS contract players have said on tape that what they get gear is not that different to what the consumers are getting. Probably in a way DHS tries their best to manufacture gear to the best standards they can and due to material and process defects they cannot always succeed to make Ma Long's W968 for everyone.

I'm sure they have several criteria for "binning" the blades, rubbers, balls etc. So in a way you might just buy a Fang Bo carbon blade from Aliexpress for 40 American freedom bucks and you might end up with a blade that is like 99% the same as Ma Long's. Maybe it just failed the binning test on some visual thing, but in function it's 99% the same.
Probably I'm stretching this, I'm sure some selected blade makers are making the blades for the CNT from the best possible wood, but who knows?!
Fang Bo carbon blades have really freaking nice quality to be honest. For 40 USD they are really no brainers if someone is looking for inner ALC...

Then again I see daily dozens of W968 national and provincial blades being sold to people on Wechat, the sellers post the pics all the time so W968 really has zero exclusivity. You might think there is 1pcs of W968 in a 1000pcs of HL5 blades but you'd be surprised how easy it is to buy one and how many are sold.

Don't get me wrong, it's not just DHS and W968, heck I see the same numbers from Golden Viscaria too, maybe not now but in the past 2 years I saw hundreds of Golden Viscarias being sold. So how exclusive do you think that is?

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There are lots of well off collectors in China. They pay top dollar for the most expensive and exclusive. They don't care about W968. They want the most exclusive W968 such as W968-01.

hipnotic said:

There are a gazillion versions of these blades, and I don't stay on top of all of them, but what the catalog says isn't entirely true. There is, or at least there used to be, a fundamental difference between the commercial version of HL5 and W968, namely in the composite they use.

This is not the best picture but it's visible. The blade on top has aramid and carbon fibers sticking out, this means the fabric has a plain weave type, with both fibers in both directions. On the bottom blade you can see the carbon wraps around the aramid fibers, they are not sticking out. This means that the aramid fibers are vertical and the carbon fibers are horizontal. In my range of fabrics this is what I call AyC, the other one being AC. This is also in line with what most people report, with the W968 having a softer feeling and more gears.

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Thanks for sharing your insight. Which one is W968?

SFF_lib said:

Thanks for sharing your insight. Which one is W968?

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W968 uses AC.

hipnotic said:

There are a gazillion versions of these blades, and I don't stay on top of all of them, but what the catalog says isn't entirely true. There is, or at least there used to be, a fundamental difference between the commercial version of HL5 and W968, namely in the composite they use.

This is not the best picture but it's visible. The blade on top has aramid and carbon fibers sticking out, this means the fabric has a plain weave type, with both fibers in both directions. On the bottom blade you can see the carbon wraps around the aramid fibers, they are not sticking out. This means that the aramid fibers are vertical and the carbon fibers are horizontal. In my range of fabrics this is what I call AyC, the other one being AC. This is also in line with what most people report, with the W968 having a softer feeling and more gears.

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Interesting PROTT selling HL5. ST handle has same picture as on top but FL has different picture
https://www.prott.vip/Product-Details.aspx?productcode=LONG5

Zwill said:

Just saw someone post a description of DHS HL5 and W968. To me it seems like pages from an official DHS catalogue as it has some info that probably only the manufacturer can confirm but I'm not sure. Posting both original Chinese and wechat translation. Sorry for the shitty English image quality.

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The official DHS catalog gives no description for W968.
I am attaching a link to the DHS 2022 catalog.
All other information and variants regarding the W968 are not verifiable.