Has anyone tried the new so-called "soft" boots? How do they compare to the old rear-entry and newer four-buckle boots?

Please don't pour all kinds of scorn on these if you're an expert skiier. I'm an intermediate, and my primary goal is to be comfortable, safe, and able to control myself on Blue-type runs.

I'm certainly not going to deride them - even experts need to flex at the ankles in uneven terrain. Racers are another story.

I haven't tried any soft boots myself, but one thing that immediately struck me when I picked up a pr of the Rossi's was their weight - they were much heavier than conventional boots.

One final comment - you can get whatever degree of nice soft flex in appropriately selected conventional boots. In some (eg, my Technica Icon), in the space of a few minutes, I can remove a few inserts, twist an alan screw and cover a huge range of stiffness all in one boot. In a soft boot, you can't do this.

Just something to think about.

Tom / PM

What's the rationale for developing soft boots? Is it to provide additional comfort or to better match the newer ski designs or is it mostly a marketing gimmick on the part of manufacturers? Or an attempt to lower production costs?

Since boots are probably the most important piece of equipment for skiing well, I'd treat any radical new designs with a healthy dose of skepticism. Unless you have the bucks to take a flier on something really new.

I do some skiing with my boots totally unbuckled; it's much tougher than normally skiing since you can't rely as much on your boots for keeping you vertical. I assume that soft boots provide much more support than this case, but would they make skiing easier or harder?

I rarely ski with the toe buckles fastened and often ski with the next buckle unfastened; so not having a rigid shell in certain sections of the boot may not be all that radical...

I've noticed that "hard" intermediate boots are much more flexible and contain plusher padding than expert boots. Intermediate boots are also cheaper. Something to think about.

[This message has been edited by johnfmh (edited 03-27-2003).]