Zap’s performance plus paintballs review

ZAP’s Performance Plus paintballs epitome of perfection

The company from Canada keeps on churning out new products that continue to impact the paintball industry. The latest and greatest from ZAP are their new line of paintballs, the Performance Plus brand. The performance plus line comes in a number of new colors and styles; Purpulsion, Kryptonizer, Blutoniumc, Atomic Rediation and High Octeal.

We found the Purpulsion paintballs to be a very unique species. The shell is purple and pearlized, while the fill was white and thick. We found the paintballs to be extremely robust and will not break for naught. We liked the shell that did not break in the barrel ever.

The performance plus line is the top of the line paintball from ZAP. In fact, on the box it is printed clearly “For Professional Use Only”. While on the economy line of ZAP paintballs that warning is not included. We felt good about ourselves because we were using the Purpulsion paintballs, thus making us “professionals”. Also printed on the box it informs the users that these paintballs are used by the top teams in Europe.

Sharif Joseph, long time paintball professional involved in paintball since the mid 80s, said, ” I really like these paintballs. I feel that the shell works well with the colors and I think it is interesting to see the shell break on another player. The balls are extremely consistent. I have seen a lot of paintballs in my life, these rank very highly. Consistent, round, no dimples… just awesome. But I found that they tend to bounce a little more than other paintballs.”

Testing:
Our staff enjoyed testing the Performance Plus Purpulsion paintballs as a part of our comprehensive barrel and paintball test of 2001. The paintballs did extremely well in all barrels that we tested. In most barrels the Purpulsion scored either the highest or second highest score, which is quite an accomplishment, since five different brands of paint were tested.

On the test date we used a Minicocker (mini autococker) running on compressed air from a Max Flow (also made by Smart Parts). The Minicocker was a Danny Love special with an input pressure of 375 psi. We also used a Black Magic Autococker with an input pressure of 220 psi. Both markers were bench clamped to a non-movable bench at the target range of Toledo Adventure Games.

The temperature ranged between 81-84 degrees in the shade all day. The humidity was between 24-29%. We used a digital scale to take temperature and humidity measurements, and later verified the readings with the local weather service.

We chose a target 45-48 feet away and controlled the velocity to be between 278 and 295 fps using a handheld Radar Chronograph manufactured by Glove Radar Inc. with a tolerance of 2%.

Size:
The ZAP PP paintballs were measured around the seam and then around the shorter side (no seam). The balls were measured with a digital measuring device with an accuracy of 0.0005 inches. Three balls were measured and the results are below.

Ball #   Seam   Short
1             .679    .677
2            .675     .676
3            .680    .683

Basically ball one measured 0.679 around the seam and 0.677 around the short end. As you can see, these results show that the measurements are very close and provides a very round paintball. Further, ball to ball consistency is also very acceptable.

As you can see the “supposed” short end is sometimes measuring larger than around the seam. Pretty amazing. This makes an excellently round paintball.

Keep in mind that we chose three random paintballs and this is not considered statistically significant.

Conclusions:
We found the Purpulsion paint to work well in Lapco Autospirit 10″ stainless steel barrel (no longer manufactured) giving a 7×7 inch marking from 55 feet away. The J&J 12 inch PRO-1 aluminum barrel did the second best giving a 9×8 inch marking from the same distance. The J&J 14 inch Ceramic barrel came in third with a 10×9 inch marking.

The way we measured the marks was horizontal then vertical for the two readings. In other words, we took a measurement from the two farthest points horizontally, then the two farthest vertically. Vertically usually was always more. But as you can see the Purpulsion paint seemed to have very close readings. As in, the vertical reading almost matched the horizontal exactly. This was not the case with other paints. This shows a lot of ball to ball consistency.

These results show the Purpulsion paintballs to be of the highest quality. In fact, one of our barrels fired a 280, 280 and 281 fps from the chrono. Very close readings suggest round balls and great ball to ball consistency. Another barrel had three readings between 275 and 278, again very tight. Yet another had 283-285 as the FPS range. Excellent consistency.

Further, with the PMI Razzor barrel, the Puprpulsion paintballs were able to achieve a 5×5 inch total splash if two shots were eliminated. Obviously, we can’t randomly remove two hits, but this barrel works very well with this paint.

These are part of the results of our paint and barrel test, the rest of the results will be published at a later date.

Special thanks:
We would like to thank Steve Moore of ZAP for accepting our invitation to review the new ZAP Performance Plus paintballs, Erich Garber of Toledo Indoor Paintball for providing us with the Radar Chronograph, Sharif Joseph of Toledo Adventure Games for helping us with setup and measurements, and NTC Computers Consulting and Networks for helping us with the data input and analysis, providing the computer hardware for the statistical analysis and overall technical help with the data.