Paintball Hoppers Can Make or Break Performance

What do you call an M60 machine gun with no bullets? A paperweight. Similarly, paintball markers sans paintball hoppers are useless in competition. That is because without paintball hoppers feeding the paintballs into the paintball marker, paintball guns are basically non entities. In the old days paintball players would make their own paintball hoppers. It really is not difficult to make a container to hold your paintballs and then feed those paintballs into the gun so that it can shoot them. But with the increase in speed in paintball tournaments and competitions, buying a sophisticated and fast paintball hopper can give a player a distinct advantage.

Paintball Hoppers Can Be Natural or Electric

Just in case there may be some confusion let’s clear up what exactly a paintball hopper, or as some would call loader, is. A paintball loader holds the paintballs until the player is ready to shoot, then the loader releases the paintball into the gun’s chamber and allows the player to hit a target. There are basically two types of paintball hoppers. There are the gravity paintball loaders and the electric paintball loaders. The gravity paintball loaders perform as you would expect – is a mechanical hopper that uses gravity to drop the paintballs into the marker chambers. The gravity fed hoppers usually hold about 200 paintballs and comfortably fits on top of pretty much any paintball marker. However, as you would expect with a mechanical device, the feed rate of the mechanical or gravity-fed paintball hoppers is much slower than electric feeders, at about eight balls per second. Electric paintball hoppers are powered by batteries and have an unceasing current that runs through the hopper to automatically feed the paintball to the paintball marker.

Paintball Hoppers Come in all Shapes and Sizes

At $159 the DYE Rotor is a pretty pricey way to feed paintballs to your paintball marker but this paintball hopper is worth every penny. With a killer ability to feed 50 paintballs per second – more than any other paintball loader on the marker – the DYE Rotor will have your paintball marker screaming for a break. The DYE Rotor sports patented paintball hopper technology, allowing its feeding system to be fast and virtually jam-free. Also made from nylon material, the DYE Rotor is wondrously strong. And if you are chaffing at the price read what one fan wrote on a review website about DYE Rotor, “the loader costs $150 or £90, and is worth every penny, it really is the best, most innovative loader available.”