This Paintball Hopper Review aims to helps you choose from dozens of paintball hoppers. We give you a short list to make selecting your paintball hopper easy.
In order to get the most out of your paintball marker, you need to match the hopper to the marker. This Paintball Hopper Review page will help you choose the best equipment.
All the hoppers listed below have been reviewed by various players and are good choices. Hoppers with significant problems have been excluded.
If your marker shoots under about 10 BPS (balls per second), a non-electronic gravity fed hopper should do.
Above about 10 BPS, you will need an electronic hopper in order to feed paintballs into the gun fast enough so that it won’t misfire or chop them.
There are different types of hoppers. The non electronic hoppers rely on gravity feed to load the paintballs into the gun. There are agitated hoppers that stir up the balls so they will more easily fall. And there are force feed hoppers that have propellers that push the balls down into the gun’s input port.
Tips for buying a hopper
• Choose a color that will not allow the enemy to see how many paintballs you have left.
• Choose a hopper that can feed faster than your gun (or your trigger finger) can fire.
Empire Reloader B Paintball Hopper Review
- Replacement Shell For Halo Too
The Empire Reloader B paintball hopper is a sound-activated electronic paintball hopper capable of 22 BPS rate of fire. Sound activation means that as soon as it hears the gun fire, the motor will turn on to feed another paintball. It doesn’t wait to sense a vacancy in the feed port like other hoppers that use an optical sensor eye. It has auto-turn off to conserve battery power, a low-battery LED to tell you when to change batteries, and it can work with 4 or 6 AA batteries. The see-through drive case lets you see the belt and gears work. It has a Rip-Drive that allows you to manually feed balls at chrono time, and you can un-jam paint; also useful if your batteries die during a game. The Reloader B is force fed, while the earlier Reloader is agitated. Available in clear, smoke, black, blue, and red.
Summary: For paintballing at speeds up to 22 BPS, an excellent high feedrate hopper for high rate of fire high-end paintball guns. The perfect combination of speed and reliability.
Reviews
The following points have been compiled from various Reloader B paintball hopper reviews. When you read a hopper’s reviews, patterns can be seen.
From 25 out of 99 reviews:
Strengths
• The Empire Reloader B does not jam.
• You can pick between a four-battery or six-battery AA pack. Four is lighter, but the feed rate is reported to be slower.
• The Rip drive allows you to manually feed paintballs when you chrono your gun, or if you have a jam in the hopper. You can cue up about 12 balls with it, and shoot them without batteries. This is useful if your batteries die on the field.
• The Empire hopper is see through, which allows you to see how much paint you have left.
• Sound activated, this Empire hopper is not bothered by dark colored paint. It only turns when you are firing, no annoying sound when you run out of paintballs.
• You can set this Empire Reloader to three different speeds so you don’t waste battery power on BPS you don’t use.
• One player reported that popping the lid on the Empire Reloader B during game play was very easy, and the lid would not come loose during slides.
• This Empire hopper has a reinforced feedneck and is solidly built. Durable, one player dropped it a lot of times by diving and smashing it against the floor, and it still worked like new.
• One of the best hoppers: $150. Pricy, but worth it.
Weaknesses
• The feed neck on this Empire Reloader is huge, which requires sanding it down to fit.
• This Empire Reloader is heavy compared to other hoppers, but similar to the egg 2.
• Several players complained that this Reloader, like all Halos, is a pain to take apart.
• One player thought the Angel was too quiet to properly sound-activate this Reloader.
Comments
• Comparing the Empire Reloader B to the Odyssey Halo B, the eye of the Halo B would occasionally not read the paint and try to feed more paint and jam. The Reloader B was far more responsive with any paint and would not jam. The Reloader B is the perfect Halo B, combining the Halo’s speed with reliability. There was controversy over which hopper was faster. One player suggested it didn’t matter; the Empire Reloader could keep up with you however it fed.
• Tapping the lid or loading paintballs will cause the loader to agitate. Screaming next to the Reloader wouldn’t. The motor will try to spin, but senses that the ball stack is under tension already so nothing happens.
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