Butterfly Table Tennis Rubber Spin Art compared to Tenergy

Butterfly Spinart - Spin Art

Spin Art boasts to offer a tacky rubber on top of the Tenergy sponge.  But its spin rating is the same as tenergy 05's.

In the early part of 2009 there was some talk about a few Japanese players, such as Ai Fukuhara, and Hirano sayaka who were reported to having switched from their old Hurricane's to a new rubber from butterfly known as SPIN ART. The stamp for the rubber was approved by the ITTF quite a long time ago although it has not been released to the public yet.  It now finally appears this more "Chinese style" rubber might have been released in China and will possibly be released world wide by April 2010.   Supposedly in Japan on the 21st.

The qualities of the Spin Art rubber are quite distinct. 

Butterfly is well known for having its own hardness scales.  For example it's softest high tension rubber is solcion at 28 degrees and everyone knows that actually means 38 degrees or more.  So you can only imagine that if Spin Art is 48 degrees then this will be one of the hardest rocks on the planet.  It will be hard to imagine why spring sponge would be used or how it could be the "spring sponge" we all know. It will also be one of the heaviest rubbers you could ever use.  Spin Art is reported to weighing over 70 grams uncut, which probably means over 50 grams when cut to fit your blade in a maximum thickness.  I think a few people will be using the lightest rubber they can find on the other side to balance this out.

• The Spin art SPIN

 The spin will not be more than Tenergy 05 (going by butterfly speed and spin ratings) even though Spin Art will have a tacky topsheet with spring sponge under it! Both Tenergy 05 and Spin Art are rated with a 11.5 spin rating. And the speed will be much slower than any of the first generation tenergies.  Even though a rubber has a tacky topsheet, it doesn't mean it will play overall with more spin.  The pip structure and the sponge are of paramount importance to the equation.  A very hard sponge though, makes consistant looping more difficult.

Speed is 11.9

Spin 11.5

Sponge 48!!!!!!!!

So it looks like a hard tenergy spring sponge + tackiness topsheet with a much more equal spin to speed ratio. If we make some more of our own inferences though, the hardness will give the user much more control in the short game very similar to the way tenergy 25 is less bouncy and easier to control in the short game.  The tackier topsheet and the less forward kicking bounce will also give some very good serves, don't you think? 

Also the new fx series will be a great softer contrast to balance out the weight of the blade.