Vapour density is heavily reliant on material.
I recall biohacker, you were getting clouds coming out of the intake holes around the time you were making those videos right? Not everyone has bud that dank, and dank bud makes the fattest clouds.
It is also still vapour, so lighting and angle makes a big difference too.
In a lot of ways that's a vape in optimum conditions and might not be a reliable benchmark IMO.
Nice vids though
That said, these things do vary in output, especially when they end up dying. I've gotten hundreds of mostly consistent hits with the odd anomalie between my RMA's. Once you start getting symptoms every session, it's on the way out and it might hang on for months or it might give an error straight away.
Symptoms are hot back-ends, only lighter-brown ABV at max temp, long heat ups, flickering blue lights.
These all mean the circuitry has been compromised, and these mechanical faults will likely last as long as the production run of the failing component, and if the component is just hot fixed, it's likely to fail in the same way in less time. Pretty clearly we've seen a lot of this with the GH project, which makes all of the sense due to blatant financial constraints. That's just how it is, how it's always been and how it will continue.
So I would recommend users not to solely rely on getting dense clouds to gauge how their unit is performing, but to note the performance and keep an eye out for the symptoms listed above predominantly.
The other thing is, the units will individually perform differently, like any product. At this time it's unknown how precise the GH temp spectrum is, but it's been observed to vary. HL have said they have the ability to do custom temps per unit, it's just a matter of time to create test rigs to squeeze the tolerance down enough. In the mean time, since they said that (AMA), there has been a bubble of combusting products and other reports of hotter performance (for the first time, I'm one of three or four combusting GH owners from yesteryear). They're aware of what they've created, but the device is still in an upgrade cycle. Lifetime warranty means you can easily follow along with upgrades when needed, but there's a cost involved for the consumer. For me it's been $1 per week (over 15 months with one replacement set of batteries and two trips back, two free replacement main bits) so I'm still stoked, but that's basically the deciding factor with the Grasshopper. Can you be bothered to keep it running? Until I have a viable alternative then it's a no brainer down here. The market has advanced since I purchased the hopper but the GH still sits in a lonely category. But the category isn't the biggest clouds, it's a discrete portable that doubles as a slide for a bong. I was underwhelmed when I first got my hopper, I thought the clouds were anemic, and there was some fluctuation of performance as that hopper had its sensors fail over 3 months, but it definitely got me high from the box, and when it was combusting months later it didn't get me much higher despite the most dense clouds.
If people without medicinal grade herb want true hyper dense vape clouds from their GH, they should try some kief in the bowl.
But, if they send the unit away to be fixed because a video misled them, then they'll get the hopper back and the bud is exactly the same and the performance hasn't changed.
Weak clouds and ABV continuously weak with blue lights flickering? Tell HL this and they'll fix it.
Weak clouds and patchy ABV but constant strength LEDs is probably just average material.
I've put maybe 50 or more different strains through the hopper, some of it amazing some of it awful, and that's simply where most fluctuation in cloud output lies. Definitely hoppers can outperform each other, but when they're properly calibrated they take exactly the same time to heat up and there's very minimal difference in performance. How long they stay properly calibrated is the issue with the hopper, as fluctuating circuitry fucks with the design fundamentally and thermal sensors are fragile. That's why they need RMAs so often, and if the use case remains the same and so does the unit/design it's always only a matter of time before it needs to go back. There's a reason no one else is making an electric vape on this scale that has a 45W heater, but I'm glad HL were silly enough to tackle it!