5 out of 5 rating for D40+
Thanks to a tip from the member Chuck Jordan I was able to buy two boxes of the new DHS 3* D40+ balls from this place:
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Excl...-Seamed-New-Material-Plastic/32793435592.html
I received them in about 10 days and I played with them this evening. I paid $15 for 12 balls. Here is my review:
I already believe that this is the best plastic ball in table tennis right now when everything is considered.
From a playing perspective I actually like them slightly better than the Nittaku Premium!! I never thought I would say that about a Chinese plastic ball!
Surface of the ball looks exactly like Nittaku Premium. The seams are a little larger, though, more like earlier seamed balls from China.
They are absolutely perfectly round.
The static bounce is exactly the same height as Nittaku Premium. If you let the bounces die out on the table, they stop bouncing at exactly the same time the Nittaku does. This is a huge improvement for DHS. None of their earlier plastic balls bounced for crap.
The D40+ have a normal sound on bouncing (this is different from the 1* version).
Spin and speed is very similar to the Nittaku, but the DHS feels a little more solid. My practice partner could not tell the difference from the Nittaku Premium when I switched up on him. More significantly, coach Li Kewai (~2700 player) could tell a slight difference and his opinion is that he preferred the DHS D40+ to the Nittaku Premium, and I shared that opinion, although the difference is very very slight. I think the DHS might be very slightly heavier. There is no accounting for tastes, but I would be really surprised if very many people conclude that the D40+ is significantly worse to play with than Nittaku Premium.
On top of all that, the DHS40+ is cheaper. Also, as DHS stops the production of their previously horrible awful terrible miserable plastic balls, these will probably become the standard, and hopefully other companies will be putting their brands on this ball. It would be a major improvement for the sport. The key will be if DHS can make enough of these D40+ balls to meet the demand and still maintain this level of quality.
This is the best news I have been able to report in a really long time. As for my expertise on this, I think it is extensive. I know the plastic ball situation in detail (more than I know about most other equipment issues). Very early on I completely stopped playing with celluloid balls, and I have tried about every 40+ ball made, and I was the first one on English language TT forums to really push the idea that the seamless balls are decent, and not as bad as the prototypes floating around for awhile might have led us to believe. (At the time the expectation was that they would be really bad). Seamless balls actually have a lot of good properties, especially durability, but I think these new balls by DHS will probably be very bad news for the makers of seamless balls. I doubt once people get their hands on these, especially given the price, that people will want to use seamless very much. The playing properties are superior (by which I mean a lot closer to celluloid) and they are cheaper.
The likelihood as a result is that in the foreseeable future we will have a lot more uniformity of balls, which for the last few years has been a big problem for our sport. If in the future the dominant balls become the D40+ ones made by DHS (possibly sold by many companies) and the Nittaku Premium, we will have returned to a situation where the brand of ball doesn't matter very much (as in celluloid era).