X-Mid Pro coming: in DCF, 2-person tent

I think the HH of DCF is misleading – particularly in a floor application – because yeah it’s absolutely waterproof when new because it’s literally a sheet of plastic, but it does form pinholes and abraded spots over time so the HH can change dramatically. It’s too bad there’s not a better body of data on used DCF HH but my experience with it is that in abrasion applications it is lower over time than a sil coated woven.

Yes Matthew – it uses 0.51 but also spruce green. It’s custom made since indeed spruce green is normally a 0.74 color.

Dan, well done. Very appealing.

For the 20.4 ounce weight, does that include corner guy lines and linelocs? And the floor tensioning and toggles? These items add up so just curious.

Also, why the seemingly beefy pulls for the magnetic tie backs? Easier to grab with gloves?

Thank you for “obsessing”.

Tent looks awesome. If I was more into DCF this would probably be my go to

You have some issues with your video though – I used to work as a pro video editor and still do a lot of photography for personal projects. Something is majorly off with your framerate / pulldown – either that or Youtube has compressed it in a way that messed it up. You can see the stuttering in a lot of the tracking shots and it really makes it hard to see clearly. Looks like maybe it was shot at 60fps and down converted improperly to 24 or something.

Thanks Robert. Yes that 20.4 oz includes all the stuff you’d need to use it normally (corner lines, linelocs, inner cords/struts). You can add optional guylines to the side panels and peaks but not needed for normal use (some people use the peak guylines with the regular models but the stiffer DCF fabric makes them less important here).

The pull tabs make it a lot easier to use the magnets. Some other brands with magnets don’t have these and it makes them fiddly to use. The grosgrain is quite light. No more than 1 g on the tent.

“You have some issues with your video though – you can see the stuttering in a lot of the tracking shots”
You’ve got a good eye for this. Learning how to make good videos has been a learning process and I certainly don’t have it all figured out. In this case, it was my first time using a gimbal for the panning shots and I ended up moving it quicker than ideal so watching the footage in real time was a bit too rapid movement. A lot of the panning shots are slowed down to 50-75% speed, which of course does tank the framerate. In Final Cut Pro X I’ve used the frame blending function to smooth that out but it doesn’t work 100% so you do see more or less flicker in those shots.

I’m getting a little nervous that they’ll sell out before I can place an order.  Realistically, I guess don’t absolutely need it.  But when have I ever been realistic about buying tents?

I am incredibly psyched about this tent.  So well thought out.  And Dan, THANK YOU for making it single-wall.  Everyone seems to be gravitating to double-wall, but I have never understood the attraction of double-wall designs.  So much extra weight and bulk for no material benefit.  Can’t wait to place my order, and really can’t wait to get it in my hands.

PeU is polyether urethane, right? That coating should be more resistant to hydrolysis than standard PU.  Would it last in a humid environment that is always at 95% humidity or above?

Plain PU coatings develop a noticeable smell here after a couple of years, but I have never dealt with PeU.

Thanks,

Niko Z.

Thanks Chris!

Niko: Yes PEU is far better for hydrolysis. That’s essentially the main point of it – it is far more stable and resistant to hydrolysis than PU, so the industry is switching.

Great, thank you for the information.

<p style=”text-align: left;”>For all the huffing about the Pro floor, it has been done before. Henry Shires at Tarptent first offered the DCF Notch w either nylon or DCF floor. I thought it brilliant. Why he stopped offering silnylon Ive no idea. But Dan’s take on it makes total sense. Packed size and long term durability for what 1-2 ounces more? If a couple ounces bother you, carry less of other items. I’ll take durability and packed size.</p>

I only hike solo (with an xmid) but this is still very tempting.

I’m curious why you went with a sil-nylon floor over sil-polyester? (Not questioning the choice, just interested since you are very thoughtful about such things.)

I do love polyester. The Pro is our cutting edge superlight version, so we wanted to take everything a step lighter while still keeping good function and lifespan. You can’t really get polyesters that are lighter than the 20D that we use in the the regular models, whereas a lot more options are available for nylon. We looked as some nylons and ended up finding this 15D nylon that tests very close to our regular 20D polyester in terms of durability and waterproofness, but it is lighter so that is attractive. So it is durable enough to last a long time with reasonable care. For a fly I wouldn’t go nylon because you’d have sag, but for a floor most of the advantages of polyester are less important (e.g. UV resistance, non-sag) so we figured the switch was worth the weight savings here.

This nylon is very close to 1.0oz/yd, so about the same weight as a 1.0oz DCF floor but I think more durable and longer lasting, plus it gives a way smaller packed size (e.g. the Duplex with a composite floor packs 50% larger at 500 vs 340 cu in).

Dan, do you plan on having other colors in the future? My old Bibler tent is yellow which makes for a cheery golden sunlight feel inside which I’ve enjoyed.

There’s not really any DCF colors as cheerful as your Bibler yellow since they are all pretty pale. For 2022 we only have the spruce green, but if it goes well we aren’t opposed to having another color or two. A bit more hassle to keep it all organized but not that hard. Could be something we do for 2023.

I think you chose the best colour. All the colours end up looking pasty when made with Dyneema anyway.

How slippery is the coating on the floor?

It’s funny how Dan D mentions the DCF floors making it harder to pack the tent down small. I was just packing up my Altaplex right before reading that and was commenting to myself how so much of the packed size was due to how stiff and hard it is to compress that 1oz/y DCF. I still prefer how the DCF is less slippery for my sleeping pad though compared to silnylon and similar fabrics, but I have a section of MLD 1/8 foam pad now that might make that a moot point.

I apologize if this question is too off-topic, but are tent makers just going with the thought that larger hikers looking for solo tents, should just use 2P tents? I think a lot of us would be looking at the X-mid Pro 2 as a solo shelter with added space. It’s how quite a few folks use their Duplex.

Is there just not enough of a market for plus-sized solo shelters that focus more on length than width? I would think having a 2P tent that doubles as XL-Solo is the safer choice for the tent maker as it then covers two categories in a way without having a separate product that doesn’t cover both, and might be too low volume to justify.

How much is that driven by trying to hit a certain weight number vs. just a general lack of market for larger solo shelters?

“How slippery is the coating on the floor?”

The floor isn’t slippery. It’s great. Silnylon can be deadly slippery because some things slide really well on sil, but we use a sil/PEU where the PEU makes for a much more grippy top surface. It really is the best of all worlds. Quite durable, good waterproofnesses, non-slip, and very compact.

Excellent!

“I apologize if this question is too off-topic, but are tent makers just going with the thought that larger hikers looking for solo tents, should just use 2P tents? I think a lot of us would be looking at the X-mid Pro 2 as a solo shelter with added space. It’s how quite a few folks use their Duplex.”

Ideally a tent would come in 1P, 1.5P, and 2P versions, where the 1.5P is good for bigger hikers or people with dogs/kids, and then the 2P is a real two for two adults. However, a lot of so called 2P tents on the market are quite tiny for two with heavily inward sloping walls, so it has become the norm for people that want a bit of extra space to go with a 2P.

With my tents, we try to have the 2P as a real 2P tent so it can be a bit overkill for a solo hiker. A lot of people still use our 2P tent for 1P and now the Pro 2 is a little bit smaller and much lighter so it’s even better suited for a bigger solo person, but ultimately there would still be some people who are best served by a 1.5P version. The problem with doing that is that the advantages would be slight (maybe 18oz instead of 20oz) and the 1.5P market is a lot smaller, so it’s hard to do a production run in that size when production minimums are high and the design work is a lot, yet the market is smaller. If the X-Mid Pro is popular enough we might do a 1.5P someday, but it would be a couple years off since the regular Pro 2 works pretty well for that now. The parallelogram shaped floor in particular gives one diagonal that is very long, so it works very extremely tall solo users now and trimming that back to a 1.5P would only be a slight advantage at best. Even if we did a 1.5P, a lot of those people might still opt for the 2P because it’s a lot more space yet for another 2oz.

It seems like the next frontier in innovation might be the next level up, where factories are improved so they can cost effectively handle variations in sizes, vs getting the cost savings from blindly duplicating exactly the same thing and letting the consumer deal with the variations.  Then everything from your socks to your tent could be made to fit precisely together for your body. Like a fully integrated hiking system.

Re: the difference between a 1P and 2P model.

For those extra two ounces you’d probably get better weather resistance, too.

Depending on the design, 2P models can often be more weather resistant than 1P models for only a small weight penalty.

This is especially true of most tunnel and dome designs. In the past, Hilleberg regularly recommended 2P models for solo use in challenging conditions but that may have changed with the introduction of a “Black Label” version of the Soulo (1P). I remember reading an account of a Red Label Soulo that was flattened by wind (!) above 10,000 feet while a 2P Jannu being used as a solo tent came out okay. Both structures use three poles but the Jannu’s larger size apparently creates a geometry that sheds wind better.

Roger’s tunnel might have been the exception. I remember that he made a 1P solo version for Ryan and I bet that it performs just as well as the 2P version that Roger has often written about.

For rectangular monopole mids. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I think that a 2P version does better than a 1P version if the heights are basically the same, but if the heights are significantly different, the lower height of the 1P version trumps the 2P. Single pole mids reaching up into 4P+ territory need to switch to hexagonal or octagonal designs to get better wind resistance.  An octagonal 1/2P mid is very stout but doesn’t have the best size/weight ratio.

Designers of dual pole trekking pole tents like Dan and Henry must have a good sense by now of the differences between the 1P and 2P versions of their various designs wrt weather resistance, so it would be interesting to hear from them about this — or from anybody else with experience in this area.

The X-Mid manifestly aims for the best user-friendly compromise among weight, space, livability, weather resistance, ease of use, and price, not to excel in one area at the expense of others.

Thanks for the reply, Dan. I appreciate your candidness on the topic from an industry expert. Your explanation is sort of what I thought might have been going on. And congrats on becoming such a sought-after brand in the hiking world. That’s an incredibly difficult feat to get to the point where all your inventory sells out instantly.

As a 6’4″ hiker, so far the only tent I have tried that I think fits closest to a solo+ shelter, is my Altaplex. It sort of seems like a goofy solution on paper, but having the tent pitched high with the deep bathtub floor really helps add some space at the head and foot ends. Seeing as how they stopped making the Altaplex for years, I can see your point on how small that market probably is. Zpacks seems to be in a very unique position to adjust their production to meet demand and can maybe get away with having so many variations and models in their lineup, even if not hot sellers. If they drop a product for years, it’s probably for very good reason.