So after a week of being away in the very hot tropical island of Palau, I am back in the golfing world here in Japan. The weather was great, the water was crystal clear and diving was fun, but it was hard to believe a place as beautiful as Palau did not have a golf course so I'm glad to be back!

It's the time of year here in Japan were many of the top manufacturers are releasing new 2010 models. This is an exciting time for golfers and with so many new drivers to choose from it can sometimes be overwhelming. I've talked in the past about driver specs and how different specs can affect a driver's true performance as well as finding the right shaft.

Today I'm not going to talk about shafts for once but rather look at some interesting numbers provided by Golf Digest Japan on several of the latest and greatest drivers here in Japan. We're talking about real specs, the loft, the lie, the face angle, the center of gravity, where the sweet spot actually is and more. Many manufacturers state a certain spec on their mass produced drivers but due to manufacturing oddities and quality control, what you see is not what you always get.

Do real specs make a difference to golfers? For many average and recreational golfers, they probably don't think twice when buying a driver off the shelf at their local golf shop. However, for the better player, the golf enthusiast, the player struggling with  their driver shot, real specs on a driver can make a huge difference.

Imagine you're a player who battles a hook and would like to keep the ball from ballooning. You see that new model driver with a 9.5* loft and square face angle and think that is the driver for you to keep the ball straight and get that more penetrating trajectory. What if that driver had a real loft of 12.8* and the face was in fact closed 2.0* due to manufacturing inconsistencies? Those rainbow drives and duck hooks could end up getting much worse.

So we've got data for 24 new model drivers but due to space constraints I will post what I think people are the most interested in (maybe I'm just lazy^^) including the new Titleist VG3, Nike Machspeed Round STR8-Fit, Callaway Legacy Type S, Tourstage X-Drive 703, Yamaha Inpres X D201, Srixon Z-TX, ONOFF Red, R9 SuperTri, PRGR GN502 Tour 440, Cobra S2 and Ping G15. Please keep in mind that these are only examples, what you see here doesn't necessarily mean every single club of a specific model has real specs like this. The drivers were randomly picked off the shelves. I've also made a few images of what key specs players like to look at here in Japan using the new PRGR 505 RED driver (which unfortunately was not part of the test but I just happen to have taken pics of the driver yesterday).

So click Read More to find out all the results of the test!

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