Paintball Magazine May 2017 Paintball.Media | Page 60

filled their line with more affordable, yet no less
quality, paintball markers of both the poppet
and spool valve style, from the affordable Etha
and recently-released Etha2 to the ETek, now on
its fifth incarnation and the GTek and GTek160R.
Whether creeping through the woods on the
weekend for fun, battling for objectives in the
Ultimate Woodsball League, competing on the
local or regional tournament scene or slugging
it out with the best in the world in the National
XBall League, Eclipse has a marker that can
get the job done and they continue to prove it
season after season. Two of the powerhouses
of the Eclipse marker line, the ETek and GTek,
offer high-end performance at prices almost any
player can afford, but which should you choose?
The beauty of that question is you really can’t
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make a wrong choice.
When it was initially released, the ETek was a less
heavily milled, affordable companion to the Ego,
operating with a regulated, electronic poppet
system placing the marker’s bolt in a tube above
the valve and rammer riding parallel in a tube
beneath. The ETek and its more recent updates,
the ETek2, LT and AM models and, most recently,
the ETek5, have simultaneously become a serious
recreational player’s dream and a great place to
start for players looking to move into the world
of high-performance markers offering a great
mix of quality, performance and price. Offering
a clamping feed neck, a two-piece Autococker
threaded barrel, standard regulators, a double
trigger, an on/off bottle adapter, anti-chop