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I bought this robot after Vegas this year and had it for a
month. I liked this robot a lot. Cost
was about US$1000 delivered to my door. Basically,
it is almost an exact copy of the Newgy, except that it is heavy and made of
steel. It stands on it's own, and
the net is permanently attached to the robot.
This is interesting in that you can move the robot far from the table to
do counterlooping drills for added realism.
Useage and function is exactly like what I wrote above for Newgy; i.e. it
makes tons of spin 360 degrees around the head, is instantly adjustable, etc.
But there were problems with this robot too.
The slowest frequency of ball feed was still much too fast for my liking,
less than 1 second in between balls at the slowest speed.
This wasn't enough for me to do serve return drills where you get in
ready position, the robot serves short, you step in and flip and then get back
to ready. It was suggested to me that I just let every other ball go,
but that's obviously inconvenient. Calling
for customer service didn't help at all, I was told the robot's designers and
manufacturers were in Shanghai and there was nothing anyone could do.
The other obvious drawback is that this robot is non-programable
and doesn't make no-spin balls. One last weird thing is that the Oscillation mode isn't quite
as random as the Newgy. It will
shoot balls right and left but always in the same 2 spots.
The Newgy, on the other hand, oscillates independently of the shooting so
balls will shoot truly in a random fashion.
Think of this Y&T robot as a much sturdier Newgy for a reasonable
cost. BTW, I see that they've now
introduced a "new and improved" Y&T robot that supposedly has a
better "oscillation" feature. I
wonder if they've made it more random like the Newgy?
Finally, the Oscillation button on this robot was behind the robot, so
you had to stop and go turn it on and off to change from stationary to
oscillate. On the Newgy, the
oscillation controls were at the remote center, so you could turn that on and
off instantly.
Marco Borrillo
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