Fun. Table tennis robots are just a lot of fun. You can hit the ball hard if you want; it doesn't care, it shoots you out another one, until the bucket is empty. You can be totally uncoordinated, and it doesn't matter. The robot just keeps shooting the balls out, at the same place if you want it to, and eventually you'll figure out where to put your paddle and start hitting them back. Seven-year-old kids have a great time with it. 80-year-old grandparents love it. I love it, too.
Practice. Lots of things are hard to learn in table tennis. Some of them are especially difficult with human partners. Hitting an underspin ball with a topspin return, for example, is something that Seattle players don't have a lot of opportunity to practice. If you ask for an underspin ball, and then hit it back with topspin, then a human practice partner will normally return your topspin with another topspin, so you can't do another one.
Actually the underspin on TTmatic 500B's is weak at best, unfortunately; one other owner reports the same problem.
Actually, choppers can give you another underspin ball, with some degree of consistency. Unfortunately, there are hardly any real choppers in the Seattle area. And Petri Heinonen or Victor Wu might not be available to spend a half hour chopping your topspin loops back to you, so that you can learn how to do it. Instead, you can use a robot to practice. Set it up to give you what you want, practice it until you've learned something, and then switch to something else.
It's a good idea to come with a list of things you want to practice. You can do a bucket of balls with one, then reset the machine for another drill, and do another bucket on that one.
Warning: It's important to be careful about overdoing it. If you keep doing the same motion over and over, you can eventually hurt yourself. It's easy to not notice how certain muscles are working too hard. That's why I decided to use half-hour time increments; a half hour is already too much time to work on a single stroke. So you'll have to sign a release and use good judgement in varying drills. Switch from forehand to backhand, or from top-spin to underspin, and work on a variety of strokes. Then you won't hurt yourself.
Back when I had more money ;-) I bought myself a top-of-the-line club-quality TTmatic robot to develop my table tennis game (plus -- I admit it -- it's so fun!).
It's an amazing machine, built like a Mercedes: German quality. If you've played on one of those plastic Newgy machines, you don't know what you're missing. They get gummed up and vibrate and fall apart, you have to take it apart a lot to clean it, and in my experience they just aren't as consistent or as flexible. Comparison here.
With the two heads on this (500B) model, you can set two different types of spin on each (say underspin and topspin), set each head to oscillate separately (how far left and right and how quickly), and tell the ball feeder to feed randomly or in a particular pattern to one side and then the other (as an example, 3 forehand topspins, 2 backhand underspins, then repeat).
The TTmatic is built to last forever; so I doubt I'll ever get the value out of it in my lifetime. And frankly I feel like I'm hogging the fun to keep it all to myself. So I thought, why not share the joy and let other people use it, and maybe ask for a donation to help pay down its mortgage ;-)
Why not, indeed? I work at home, most days, so I can let you in and help you figure it out, and fix it if the sponge wears out or something. Sounds great!
So I've decided to offer this as a service to my ping pong playing friends. If it works out, I'll keep doing it; if not, I'll just take down this web page and stop offering it.