WDP Angel LCD

The Angel LCD. Just as we Americans start to think we are the best when it comes to anything involving paintball, the Brits come along and prove us wrong. Without a doubt, WDP’s Angel LCD is the most technically advanced gun in paintball to date. It could arguably be the most well designed one as well. A brief history lesson. The Angel made its appearance in the US around 1997(I am pretty sure this is the year, but it might have been 1996). There were only a few of them around and NPPL Pro team Avalanche began using these super guns with everyone taking notice. The rate of fire was phenomenal. The early Angel wasn’t without its problems however. Many of the early models had a tendency to break paint. This might have been the gun, or the fact that there was a loader around at this time fast enough to feed it. Of course, there were other problems such as bad circuit boards, which caused the gun to shut down in the heat (this happened to me, and I promptly sold my old Angel only to find out that WDP diagnosed and fixed the problem a month later). Over the past few years, the Angel has evolved into what is not the LCD. This gun has so many features it has hard to find a place to start (or stop for that matter). Let’s start at some of my personal favorite features. The Angel has a unique bolt design that allows the user to remove the bolt in a second. Pull back the knob at the end of the gun, and the “rotor breach” (as WDP calls it) slides open giving you instant access to the bolt, chamber, and hammer area. Very nice if you need to clean the bolt off in the middle of a game. All of the older Angels had that feature, but a new change is with the circuit board. There are 26 different rates of fire on the Angel LCD, ranging from semi auto, to full auto, various burst modes even turbo. The turbo modes have been  locked out, but WDP sells a data link kit, which, allows you to interface the LCD to your home computer. Previously the turbo mode was “locked” but some people on the ‘net have managed to crack the code. Don't ask, I don't know it. Right in the middle of the grip is an LCD screen through which you can control everything the electronics do. The screen also shows the battery life status and whether the LCD is in safe, or live mode. The LCD also comes in handy for precise tuning of the dwell time. This controls how long the valve stays open. The LCD comes set with a dwell of 14. Increase the dwell and the gun becomes a little quieter and a little easier on paint. Decrease it and you have better gas efficiency. Another great feature is the game timer. There are two options with the timer. You can enable the “vibes” on or off through the LCD screen. When “on”, it will cause the LCD grip to vibrate when time starts to run out (and consequently sound like a seagull on crack).  Both timer options show the time-countdown on the LCD display. With the LCD you should always know how much time you have left. Still, there are more features. The LCD comes with a double trigger with dual set screws on the inside so you can adjust how much slack there is before and after the trigger pull is complete. This allows for the possibility of a VERY short trigger pull. You have to remove the grip frame to access this, and be careful that you don’t tear any of the wiring when you do this. More standard features like a ball detent, inline regulator, hogue grips, and a venturi bolt can be found on the LCD. The ball chamber area and bolt have been enlarged on the LCD to accommodate different styles of paint and to decrease ball breakage. Ok, I’m going to have to stop there with the positive features, as I could probably keep going for a while… One downside of the LCD is that the on/off switch has been removed. WDP replaced it with a yellow "key" that needs to be inserted into a slot on the back of the gun. Not only is this very easy to loose, but it is a pain to worry about. WDP needs to bring back the on/off style switch. 

For this review we decided to review a Warped Sportz Dark Angel. Why? No reason other than that they look baaaaaad. These guns perform the same as a regular Angel LCD, but they come with a lifetime warranty from Warped Sportz, have an all aluminum high rise feed adapter (the regular LCD only has a plastic adapter) and out of this world milling. We set the Angel up with an Air America Armageddon 4500 psi 45 cubic inch bottle and angled drop forward adapter.  We chose this setup for two reasons. First, the Armageddon is one of the highest flowing systems around, perfect for the Angel. And second, because it is light and very tiny with the 45ci bottle. With this setup we got about 800+ shots of a 4500psi fill, and about 500 shots of a 3000psi fill. This makes for a very impressive setup. The Angel LCD comes stock with a 14" barrel which has an inner diameter of .687". A good choice by WDP as it will accommodate most paint sizes. Of course, we realize that just about everyone is buying a Dye barrel for their Angel these days, so we also decided to conduct this review with a 12" Stainless Dye Boomstick, and a 14" Titanium Boomstick. Actually, we just wanted to have an excuse to use the Dark Angel more :)

There is so much we could say here, but is it really necessary? The Pewter Dark Angel LCD we used looks amazing. Just let the pictures speak for themselves. Instead of  talking about looks, bear with us as we talk more about how impressed we are with the design of the Angel. Everything inside this gun is tightly packed together. You'd be hard pressed to find any significant "wasted space". If you are holding the gun in your hand, the bottom left section holds the rechargeable NiCad battery (charger included), the bottom right houses the ram, hammer, valve, and low pressure regulator (remember what we said about it being the best engineered gun around?) and the middle or top portion contains the bolt, and 14 way valve. This tightly woven design makes the Angel LCD very compact.

The Angel feels very refined and solid. The center feed puts the hopper right over the center of the gun, something that makes just about any paintball gun pretty well balanced. But the sheer design of the Angel that we keep harping on helps immensely in this area. Most advanced guns include an inline regulator of some sort, and the Dark Angel LCD is no different. The regulator also acts as a foregrip, keeping the gun balanced in tight snap shooting situations. Hogue rubber grips are included giving the gun a soft and comfortable feel, and with the Armageddon air system on board the gun feels perfect. A solid, well balanced gun is important for performance. It dramatically affects your ability to snap shoot accurately and properly. The Angel's "feel" is one of the reasons why it is a fun gun to hold. You pay $1000+ for an Angel these days, but once you have it in your hands it feels like a "million bucks". Ya, that sounds cheesy, but the gun just feels great and there isn't really a better way of describing it. Angels are expensive guns, but once you have it in your hands, most thoughts about money vanish from your brain. 

How did the Angel perform? Well, since so this gun has so much hype around it, we put it through the most rigorous testing out of any gun so far. Not only did we play on a regular weekend basis with it, Chris (the website guy) took the Dark Angel LCD with him to the 10man NPPL World Cup in Orlando, Florida.  Several different types of paint were used throughout the course of the review. First, we used Diablo Hellfire in our consistency and accuracy observations, and then either used more Hellfire or PMI Marballizer when we practiced at the local field. At the World Cup, Chris used PMI Evil. The Angel accommodates different types of paints very well. Evil and Hellfire have thin shells and the only time that the Angel broke paint was at the World Cup when Chris was playing in a laydown cone shaped sup'air bunker. And even this can be explained to an extent. In Chris' own words: "The bunker I was in was right on the 50 yard line, close to the center of the field. This meant that just about every one of my opponents could, and quite often were shooting at my bunker. To live in my bunker I had to lay in a contorted position. To snap shoot I had to lean out at an angle and fire off a few quick shots at a time. This rapid motion combined with the angle I had to hold the gun caused me to break several balls in the breach area."  It is pretty clear that the Angel rarely breaks paint. In only one game at the World Cup, out of the countless hours we used the gun did it break paint.


To test the accuracy of the Dark Angel LCD we benchmounted the gun into a vice and pointed it at two targets. One set out at 25 yards, and the other at 40 yards. With the velocity set in the 280s, thirty Diablo Hellfire paintballs were fired at each target.  In addition to using the stock barrel, we used a 12" Dye stainless boomstick and a 14" Dye Titanium boomstick. These results should not pertain to only the Dark Angel LCD. Similar results would be found with a regular LCD. First, we tested the 14" Infinity barrel at 25 yards. The resulting shot grouping was fairly large, measuring 7 inches to the left, 8.5" to the right  (actually you can see from the picture that it is more of a downward direction "right"), and about 8 inches to the top and bottom respectively. Not that bad. All of the paintballs we fired hit the target, but we were expecting slightly better results. Moving onto the 12" Dye Stainless boomstick, we left the gun in the exact same place in the vice, switched barrels and rechronoed into the 280s range. We had to rechronograph the Dark Angel LCD due to the differences in barrel design. Some barrels use a little more gas, others are more gas efficient. This time around accuracy improved dramatically. Although 2 paintballs missed the target, the shot grouping tightened up dramatically. It measured 4 and 5 inches to the right and left and 3 and 5 inches to the top and bottom from the center respectively.  Much better! Following the same procedure described above to switch barrels; we slapped on the 14" Dye Titanium barrel and were very surprised to see the Dark Angel LCD perform about the same as the 14" Infinity barrel did. The grouping measured 4 and 8.5 inches to the right and left and 9 and 8 inches to the top and bottom respectively. As with the Infinity barrel, all of the 30 Diablo Hellfire paintballs we fired hit the target. Taking the Dark Angel LCD out to 40 yards we were very surprised with what we found. The stock Infinity barrel missed the target 16 times out of 30 shots fired at it and the grouping basically measured 9 inches in all directions with most of the impacts occurring on the outer edges of the target. As we expected, the 12" stainless Dye boomstick faired much better,  but even still, 12 out of the 30 shots fired missed the target. The grouping was much tighter this time around however. Top to bottom measured 6 and 9 inches respectively, while to the right and left the grouping measured 2 and 7 inches. With the 14" Dye Titanium boomstick the results might shock any little ones near by, so cover their eyes. The shot grouping was so sporadic with this barrel that we had to fire 50 paintballs at the target. 28 out of that 50 missed, and the resulting shot grouping measured 8 inches to the right of the center, 9 inches to the top and 9 inches to the bottom.  Without a doubt, at this point in the review there are a lot of readers saying "I knew it all along," and perhaps many more saying "I don't believe it." In fact, we didn't either. The results reported above were the results of our second time testing the Dark Angel LCD's accuracy. The first weekend when we tested the Dark Angel LCD we recorded similar results. We thought there might be something wrong with the paint we were using, or maybe it was just the weather.  The paint to barrel fit was not ideal, but it certainly wasn't too loose. We've tested other guns with a much looser paint to barrel fit that performed better, so we were fairly confident that wasn't the only factor. We do believe that it certainly contributed to part of the problem. So, we came back the next weekend, with a new case of paint, and found the results that were just reported. So, what could explain these results? If you've read these reviews, you know what section is going to appear next. Yes, that's right. Consistency.

As previously stated, a slightly loose paint to barrel match might have cause some of the inaccuracies of the Angel, but issue might also be the velocity consistency from shot to shot. For a paintball gun to be accurate, it must be consistent. If one shot's velocity is significantly lower than the previous shot's velocity you will not have a tight shot grouping. To test the Dark Angel LCD's consistency we fired 10 Diablo Hellfire paintballs over the chronograph (we only used the stock 14" Infinity barrel), recorded the results, waited 10 minutes and repeated the same process. Readings w/ stock regulator Shots Fired 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10  2nd String 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10  F.P.S. 279 283 283 270 281 275 278 279 270 274  F.P.S. 269 284 286 280 270 278 276 274 284 273


This review has a different style of graph than the others, and we hope it illustrates the importance of a consistent paintball gun. As you can see from the graph, the first string of shots bounced around a little. Nothing too extreme, but it could be enough to cause noticeable results. The green line through the center illustrates the average velocity in f.p.s. throughout the ten shots fired. In this case the average was 277f.p.s. The standard deviation is essentially the average variation of each shot from this average line. The first ten shots had a standard deviation of 4.80f.p.s.  We can see from the second graph that the overall trend of the Dark Angel LCDs velocity during the next ten shots (ten minutes later) is about the same as the first string with one exception. While the average velocity of the second string of 10 shots remained the same (277f.p.s.) certain fluctuations are a little more extreme. This caused the standard deviation to increase to 6.02f.p.s.. What does this say? Overall, the Angel holds its velocity pretty well as the average f.p.s. remained the same, but from shot to shot it is not the most consistent gun there is. Still, it is more consistent than others we've tested so we weren't to alarmed. But we feel it needs to be said, that we thought the Angel should have been more consistent. As with the accuracy testing portion of this review, we did the chronograph observations twice. The first time around we had results similar to the ones above, but thought it could be better. So we purchased an Angel Tool Kit from Paintballgear.com and set the snap ring to the right position, and made sure that the LPR was set to the right pressure. The results we described are ones from the second test we took.

The Angel's rate of fire has ALWAYS been its claim to fame. This is the very reason that so many people took notice of it. It shoots extremely fast, with almost no work at all. The trigger is fully adjustable, but most people like to set them fairly short. The trigger microswitch is also soft and a little sensitive. We use the word sensitive because it can go off very easily. The Angel LCD has a small kick to hit. The gun doesn't buck around when you shoot it, but you can notice it move slightly. With the trigger set at a short pull this vibration helps out in rapid fire. The neat thing about the LCD is that not only is the rate of fire adjustable through the circuit board, but it also has a feature that tells you the max rate of fire that you achieved. Most players that used the LCD were able to shoot it at 9 balls a second, but those that were more experienced with Angels were able to max out at 13 balls a second. The truth is that it's almost impossible to describe how fun the Angel is to shoot. When we let a few different "newbies" at the field try the Dark Angel LCD out at the firing range (what, you think we'd actually let them play a game with this expensive piece of hardware?). The remarks ranged from comments like, "that's sick!" to just shear giggling. The trigger on this gun is awesome.


The Angel was tested out on the field in some intense tournament practices before we actually put the Angel to the accuracy and rate of fire tests in this review. Even after those tests, Chris, the resident paintball god, felt confident enough to take the gun to the World Cup for some 10man paintball. The gun held up great, and performed almost flawlessly. The only problem encountered was the one described at the start of this review where Chris broke a few paintballs. This certainly didn't pose much of a problem in the true sense of the word. Most paintball guns won't feed reliably if you hold them at a funny angle and try to snap shoot. To condemn the Dark Angel LCD for this "problem" would be like saying it sucks because it won't shoot upside down. Enough said.

With the setup we used on the Angel it worked exceptionally well for running and shooting. The gun has a great feel, is fairly light, and the trigger is soft and short to the touch. Furthermore, that slight vibration we talked about before helps in this department too. We all know it is hard enough to walk and chew gum, or at least that's what the commercials on my living room socializer (ie. Television) say. Running and pulling the trigger with a reasonable degree of accuracy can be hard enough. This vibration, combined with the fact that you are already bouncing up and down, makes shooting reasonably fast on the run simple.

The relative ease of the Angel to snap shoot is the reason why Chris chose to play with the Dark Angel LCD at the World Cup. All of the reasons that make the Angel a great run and shoot gun help it to be the perfect front players gun. The center feed setup of the Dark Angel LCD will allow you to play very tight to your bunker with little exposure.  Shooting left or right handed is also a must on today's speedball and concept fields and the Angel is perfect in this category for two reasons. First, it has a centerfeed, which helps out balance wise and to keep you from exposing too much, and second is the trigger. Most players can shoot fast with one finger, but not with the other. With the Dark Angel LCD the trigger is short and soft, making it easier to shoot reasonably fast even with your off hand. Front players, pay attention. If you have the money, this is a gun you should consider. You can play in a contorted position, and still play an effective role in the game. Not that this isn't possible with others guns, just with the Dark Angel it is easier :)

So we've decided that the Dark Angel LCD is a great choice for front players, how about back players? Well, here is an area where you have to decide what you absolutely must have. The Dark Angel LCD shoots fast, no doubt about that. The ability to shoot long, fast ropes of paint is a must for back players these days. And the Dark Angel LCD does a good job of that. But as we saw in our accuracy observations, it wasn't the most accurate gun at long ranges. Buying a 12" Dye stainless boomstick seems to help out in that department, and perhaps putting a more consistent inline regulator on it would improve the accuracy at long range even more. The accuracy testing of this review make it clear is that the stock barrel doesn't cut it at long ranges. It is certainly capable of shooting some of those "freebee" shots where someone left a large part of their body exposed. But when it comes to shooting a small target far away, you either have to dump a lot of paint at the target (which the Angel can do), or just hope you get lucky. To be an effective back player you probably need to upgrade to another barrel. 

The Dark Angel LCD is the easiest gun in the world to maintain. After every day's use put 3 drops of oil into an air connection port, gas up the gun and cycle air through it. After about a month of continuous use, we recommend putting an extra drop of oil inside the hammer and valve area. Both these points can be accessed through the rotor breach. Could it get any easier? Ok, so we've discussed the maintenance (actually it is more of a preventative maintenance) you need to do on your Angel, so now we will talk about the problem that certain Angel LCDs have been plagued with. Bad boards. From time to time it seems someone buys an LCD with a bad circuit board. If this happens to you, contact WDP. They have been AWESOME about taking care of this. Even though WDP is in England, they will get you a replacement circuit board in a very quick timeframe. 

In short, the Dark Angel LCD is a very nice gun. It feels great, balances well, shoots fast, is reliable, rarely breaks paint, and shoots pretty accurately at close to medium range. But, it might not be the gun for you. If you want something that shoots darts at long range out of the box, or if you want something that is a little easier on your pocket book you might want to consider another gun. We were happy with the way the Dark Angel LCD performed. It can't be everything to everyone, but no gun is. With great features like a rechargeable battery, easy access bolt, adjustable double trigger and an LCD display the Dark Angel LCD you certainly get a lot of gun for your money's worth. Like we said before, its feel is out of this world. It is only a question of whether or not you think the performance of the Dark Angel LCD is worth the high price tag. Of course, there is one thing that might be nagging many of you. Why would the 12" stainless Dye boomstick perform better than the 14" titanium Dye boomstick? Was there a problem with the titanium barrel, or do all stainless boomsticks shoot better? The truth is that we just can't tell from this review. It would take some additional testing to actually find out. In closing, we'd like to thank Dye Precision for loaning us the 12" Boomstick, and Warped Sportz for loaning the 14" Titanium barrel. This extra barrel reviews couldn't have been done without them.