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Ricochet
2k Hopper
 
First off, I would like to thank the Ricochet Development Team for giving us a great product to make this review possible.
This hopper has a space-age look to it. It is called the ricochet because of its unique deflection engineering design. The angles are in such a way that some shots will “skip” off of the hopper. This is mainly for shots that are coming in the 12 o’clock direction or close to it. This is an advantage for any player in any division.
At first glance you wouldn’t expect the hopper to hold 185 balls like the VL Revolution, but it does. The front is very narrow and pointy, but the backend is very boxy, which gives the player the extra room.
This hopper has many great features to it these include:
Flip top/sure lock lid
LCD information:
Ball counter
Some other great features include flexible agitator paddles to prevent unnecessary battery wear and most importantly unnecessary ball breakage.
 
In the last two years with my revolution I have had a handful of paintballs that get wedged under the paddle and eventually break. This doesn’t happen anymore when the Ricochet-2k.
The sure lock lid keeps the lid open when you are reloading, unlike the old style hoppers that keep closing during the reload period.
This hopper works off of one 9-volt battery. One battery delivers over 5000 shots. When the battery has 1500 to 1000 shots left the low battery warning goes off. I believe this is a perfect number to be warned at. For most tournament players this is over one game of paintballing, just enough time to change the battery.
At first I was skeptical of the 9-volt battery, if this was going to be enough power to keep up with rapid firing with such guns as the Angel, Defiant, and Shockers to name a few. That question was soon put to rest when I fired my angel at about 10 to 11 balls a second with no skips.
The ricochet hopper is the first hopper to have a ball counter built into it. This information is displayed on the far left side of the LCD display. The ball counter is accurate down to 5 balls out of every 100. So the actual count might be a few high or a few low. This is only a problem when extreme rapid firing takes place for extended time periods. The alarm sounds when 155 shots are fired. The alarm is very loud and easily heard even during rapid fire when hearing is sometimes a problem.
You might be wondering how it counts the balls. The “flap” located inside the feed tube does the counting. The “flap” also serves another purpose. When the gun is tilted on a weird angle the flap stops balls from going back into the hopper.
The ricochet hopper also has a built in game timer. This alarm sounds when there is 5 minutes left in the game and also when there is 30 seconds left. This alarm is also very loud and easily heard.
Overall, this hopper is like two hoppers in one. This takes the regular revolution hopper and adds the feature of operating with every shot fired. This acts like the Angel hopper cord. Where the trigger controls the hopper. With that said, this hopper is an “anti-jam” hopper opposed to a “de-jam” (VL Revolution).
I would recommend this hopper to anybody that has shots skipped during rapid fire, definitely to anybody that plays tournaments, and to serious weekend players that are looking for an advantage over their competition.
The only downside to this hopper is the cost. It retails for $109 plus 5 dollars shipping (from the company). I don’t believe this price is out of line. The warp feed is 1.5 times this price and you don’t get all the extra LCD features.
Currently it is available from these sites:
www.Ricochet-2k.com
www.XPaintball.com
www.pminetwork.com (dealers only)
As other sites start to carry this product I will add them to the list.
This product definitely gets The A-1Paintball Seal of Approval!
Review done by: Nick Palumbo
(Pictures are property of Ricochet Development)
Nick Palumbo
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