Back in 2010, when I was workng with John Erickson on my golf swing, we discussed Trackman. I was a staunch TM defender at that time. In hindsight, I would still defend Trackman to those people as their arguments were misinformed.
This was when Trackman really started to take off with instructors. I eventually got a bunch of different e-mails and PM's from different people. Some of whom had Phd's in some sort of scientific field. Others had lofty credentials and degrees in different fields of engineering. Off the top of my head, I think there were 7-8 people like this who discussed the merits and weaknesses of TM to me at that time.
And every single one of them either questioned or flat out found TM's margin of error claims to be way off.
I generally ignored that because I had seen the advantages of using a Trackman. I have never, not once, swayed from my opinion that if I *HAD* to choose, I would always choose a high-speed camera over a Trackman. But, combine the two and I felt (and still do), that they are a powerful combination in helping a golfer improve their game.
However, I kept hearing how Trackman alone makes a teacher better. Or other hyperbole like 'you're just guessing if you don't have a Trackman.'
The latter always puzzled me because I knew that a lot of what Trackman does is calculate and 'back into' clubhead dynamics like face angle, dynamic loft, etc.
I remember asking one Trackman owner as to how Trackman determines attack angle since it it is positioned behind the golfer from the DTL view a year ago. I was then told that Trackman locates the CoG of the club and measures factors like such as the angle that CoG of the club is coming down to determine attack angle.
Seems like a guess to me. A more educated of a guess. But, still a guess from a machine that supposedly doesn't guess.
Eventually I started to see some really weird numbers. I could throw them out and I generally started to see that if you understand Trackman, you're probably going to need about 10-20 shots with each club to throw out the bad reads and to start to get a general idea of what's going on. But, even that is still a guess.
One of the crazy things that happened to me is that I got on a Trackman one week and my clubhead speed with the driver was reading 111-113 mph. A week later I went onto a different Trackman and the speeds were measured at 108 mph. The following day I went back to the same TM and the speed was reading 104 mph.
I started discussing Trackman some more with other Trackman owners and they found some of the same issues and brought up other issues/complaints as well. A little while later, I had lunch with one fairly well known PGA Tour player to discuss my metrics and we got onto the conversation of TM, which he owns, and his own issues with it.
When Jeffy and Kelvin came out with their research, there was some skepticism from me just because it's obvious that they have their own bias against Trackman. Although, everything they were discussing made sense or at least had some sort of rational logic behind it.
They had the PGA Show here in Orlando after the TM newsletter came out and I had not read the newsletter at that time.
I had 4 different TM people come up to me, unsolicited, asking me if I had read the newsletter and how they newsletter shows that Trackman using a Phantom Camera refutes Jeffy and Kelvin's claims. I couldn't really say anything at the time since I had not read the newsletter.
I think that using a Phantom camera to actually measure these dimensions makes sense. And anybody trying to dismiss it cannot refute the fact that Trackman used the Phantom camera themselves to help measure its accuracy.
The problem with Trackman's newsletter is that Trackman was the one doing the measuring. The obvious way to do it is to have an independent source confirm it.
Then we see the Quintic Consultancy report and it backs up Jeffy and Kelvin's work and not Trackman's.
Again, I like working with Trackman. But, it's not the be all-end all. And all of those Phd's and well credentialed engineers were right...it's margin for error is nowhere near what it claims.
3JACK