As you can see from the Stroke review [above], we finally had the chance this year to test absolutely identical cambered and rockered snowboards against each other to solve The Last Great Mystery of Snowboarding: "Which One Should I Get...?!"
First, let's take a quick look at the attributes that define cambered and rockered boards. When you look at a cambered snowboard from the side, you'll see that the tips of the board bow down toward the ground, resulting in a "sad face" profile. This is technology that snowboards long ago borrowed from skiing, and the general purpose here is to keep the edges firmly pushed into the snowpack, even when the board is bouncing around over uneven surfaces, trudging through bumps and dips in the trails, or chattering through high-speed runs (and their resulting high-speed vibrations). "Maintaining edge contact at all costs" is the main job here, and it's a job that a cambered snowboard still does extremely well. Other advantages of cambered snowboards are snappy "ollie pops" off of kickers, and generally stiff boards for heavier riders, or highly experienced riders that love the thrills of high speeds and precise edge control.
Then, we have rocker. "Rocker" is essentially everything that a camber is not, and vice versa.
So: When you look at a rockered snowboard from the side, you'll see that the tips of the board bow up toward the sky, resulting in a "happy face" profile. This is technology that snowboards are today borrowing from surfing (and to a lesser extent, skateboarding), and the general purpose here is to keep the edges smartly pulled up the snowpack, even when the board is bouncing around over handrails, trudging through boxes and kickers in the trails, or lazily playing around during low-speed cruises (and their resulting flatground spins, presses, and butters). "Eliminating edge contact at all costs" is the main job here, and it's a job that a rockered snowboard still does extremely well. Other advantages of rockered snowboards are easy landings of various airs and spins, and generally forgiving boards for lighter riders, or newbie riders that love the thrills of playing around and goofing off with modern trickery.
Of course, these truisms are not one-hundred-percent black-and-white, one-hundred-percent of the time. Exceptions do exist to these rules. Adding Magne-Traction to a rockered deck (as Lib Tech, Gnu, and Rossignol do), for example, brings back some edge bite and hold that rockered decks usually lose in the equation, while fully de-tuning a cambered deck (ie, rounding over the steel edges with a file to make them smooth and blunt, instead of crisp and sharp) will eliminate a lot of the "catchyness" that usually plagues cambered snowboards. And of course, we also have a horde of new camber/rocker hybrids coming to market that claim to provide snowboarders with something approaching "the best of both worlds", while they confuse the marketplace and provide "the worst of both worlds" at the same time (although naturally enough, they don't advertise this quite as much as they tout the benefits).
So at the end of the day, which one is better? Who can I trust to give me the answers? And what should I buy? Everybody's a salesman these days, and all "truths" are half-truths at best.
Well, here's what I think is gonna happen at the end of the day: Everybody is eventually going to make (if it's a manufacturer), or buy (if it's the customer), both. Because they both have obvious benefits (and weaknesses), and they both are well-suited to some portion of the overall snowboarding spectrum. But nothing can do everything, because that would be impossible to achieve in this imperfect world of ours. Asking for perfection in this case would be kinda like asking for a McDonald's Quarter Pounder that only costs 99 cents all the time, still tastes great (like Quarter Pounders always do), but has no fat or sodium whatsoever to muck up your health and add to your obesity. Yeah, it's a great dream (especially for me), and it might even be an admirable goal for somebody to go after, someday. But, is it gonna happen anytime soon? No, probably not. And that's just the way it goes. Bummer.
In the future, we'll be testing a lot of these new "camber-rocker hybrids" as they make themselves available. But in the meantime, we're keeping a few cambered boards on hand at all times to supplement the increasingly rockered collection that's still growing a little from year to year.
That is the only way to truly get the very best of both worlds. And we don't care what anybody's slick advertising campaign has to say about it.
