All of the Draxxus lines, All of the Karnage lines, Most Diablo stuff, other cheap stuff
Marker Setup:
We use some cheap spyders, piranhas, and CCI phantoms
Recommended Barrels:
It's a grab-bag of different paints so unless you sort it doesn't matter what barrel you use
Strengths:
Price, Some high quality paint in the bag
Weaknesses:
Variety of paint means inconsistency, some defective balls
Review:
I am a field owner and started out carrying Rainbow so rec-ballers (my primary market) could have some cheap paint to shoot. I was originally told that rainbow was not defective, that it was simply overruns of the various lines and at worst some of the colors might be off. We went through two skids that were all quite good. No broken balls, no defects/dents, minimal flat spots, etc. Guys were sorting it and coming out with 500+ Inferno balls in some of the cases.
Then we got our third skid of the stuff. The first box opened had a bunch of terribly dented orange balls in it. We're talking 15-20% of the case with balls that were basically unusable unless you wanted to throw them at each other. Second box was the same, we grabbed a couple from different parts of the skid, in the end every last box in the skid was this way. Procaps basically said I was out of luck, so I got to lose several hundred dollars and suffer some bad press thanks to Rainbow.
After using some other low-end paint for a while I thought about giving Rainbow another try. I called and the guy asked if I liked the stuff, I told him the story above and he told me that they still had a lot of the cases with the infamous orange balls out there (when I called to complain the first time they said they had never heard of such a thing and in the 15 years the person had been there they had never heard of that happening). He went on to explain that Rainbow was in fact not overruns, it was defects and second quality. Now I don't know if my original contact there was a moron, or Rainbow started out being just overruns and then they changed it at some point and didn't tell anybody, but it certainly appears that they misled us about the product. Currently Rainbow is likely to have a lot of defective paint and you are better off buying cheap Wal-Mart paint.
Conclusion:
If you are a field owner/manager, don't touch this stuff - you will get burned and Procaps will not help you. If you are a player, it's a gamble on cheap paint. Any Rainbow from late 2006 and early 2007 will likely have high defect rates. It's your $30, if you want to roll the dice (or spend half an hour sorting) then go for it.
Nice review. I've had similar experiences with this stuff. I used to love it (early 2006), I'd come out with a ton of blaze, inferno, x-ball silver, and other PL balls with minimal if any breaks or dented balls. Recently in the past 7-8 months though I've bought about 6 cases of the stuff, I've never had orange balls, but the red balls and PEV balls are horrid. I had an entire case of red balls after sorting 2 cases and one bag of PEV's. THey were practically unusable, horribly deformed, dented, and tiny cracks where paint would bleed over time. 1500 useable balls out of 2 cases bought isnt saving money :/ I dont know what happened, they used to be a great practice brand.
