MIZUNO PRO 245 vs PING i530 | Golf Irons Comparison

The Mizuno Pro 245 and PING i530 are two of the newest players-distance golf irons on the market, each designed to provide exceptional distance with reliable forgiveness in a compact, pleasing aesthetic. But how do the Mizuno Pro 245 and PING i530 compare in a head-to-head test with launch monitor data?

0:00 Intro
2:21 Testing (Mizuno Pro 245)
8:45 Testing (PING i530)
11:00 Data & Conclusions

In this video, 2nd Swing’s Drew Mahowald is joined by 2nd Swing master club fitter Jake Montgomery on the driving range at Les Bolstad Golf Course for a head-to-head test of the Mizuno Pro 245 irons and the PING i530 irons.

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hey golfers I’m Drew Mah holder second swing golf today here at the Les bull at driving range with Mr Jake Montgomery Master Club fitter at our Minneapolis store it’s a beautiful day Jake for a head-to-head iron comparison out here on the driving range so we’ve got two players distance models um both new for this year so we’ve got I’ve got a ping i530 you’ve got the mauno pro 245 so I guess I’ll start with that one in your hand Jake the mauno pro 245 what have you seen from that one in the fitting base so far this year yes so in the players distance category it is very tough to beat in terms of feel yeah that’s what Muno is known for this features a copper underlay and a Kali face very soft kind of traditional more forged feel in a hollow body design generally has pretty good spin again for this category if you’re a player that’s trying to transition maybe away from a blade or a muscle cavity this is a great place to go you’re still going to have that feel you’re familiar with but with a little more ball speed and a little more Peak height yeah it’s definitely one of those clubs especially you talk about the great feel that’s Muno is known for M um you can still get that really great kind of soft almost forged feel that you might get in a muscle back iron but get it in C of this and then like you said still get a ton of that distance out of it now ping i530 kind of a late addition to sort of the releases this year was like a March release I believe uh in 2024 here i530 um you know the update from I i525 for Ping what have you seen from this one yes so I mean biggest kind of aspect I see in a fitting with this club is Peak height yeah this thing launches super high and has a ton of ball speed if you’re someone that struggles with getting the ball up in the air and you’re not looking to go towards a kind of a super game improvement Club this is a great place to go with it only having 29 degrees a loft it launches a lot higher than expected it performs very very well in the bay in terms of getting that ball up in the air yeah I think that was one of the things that uh I remember talking to the team at ping at the PJ show this year and I was surprised initially that they said that they make strengthen the Loft again because that’s you know that’s kind of a big uh you know discussion think but um to see and from you and others that this thing is still launching high enough is very encouraging So today we’re going to test these head-to-head we’ve got uh Dynamic gold shafts in each of them we’ve got the Muno Pro 245 we’ve got the Ping i530 we’ve got a full swing launch monitor with us as well and then we’re gonna have Jake swing abely you ready for that oh yeah all right let’s do it all right so first Club mauno Pro 245 um put that one down on the dress and tell me what you see my first thought is Sleek yeah you usually see you kind of players distance l a little bigger Top Line this is pretty slim so again if you’re used to that smaller Top Line this is a great place to look um sits a little flatter which mauno is known for that suits my eye pretty well hit a couple shots with it see how it feels felt pretty good yeah I will say the first comment I have just on that swing was just it like the sound isn’t that it’s not like the loud Hollow players distance that sound that you might hear it’s still yeah it’s it’s muted for that category for sure absolutely first swing your a well I guess in terms of distance I’ll just ask you before I even give you any numbers what would you expect given this this club this you know it’s a different probably than your actual gamer so what would you expect numbers wise I’d expect ball speeds around 120 to 125 carrying 175 to 180 all right kite probably around 100 ft Yep this is these are pretty good all right this is good we got this so your ball speed was 124.5 okay Carry was 181 mhm your Peak height was 107 yeah so kind of Falls right in there I mean just keep just keep doing that and uh your hypothesis will be pretty correct yeah that’s pretty good yeah all right yeah this is this is great yeah you’re uh consist so far 179 with that carry there just a little bit more spin that time that one actually crept over 60 or 6,000 excuse me 6,000 spin for this category of Club is very good y caught that one a little heavy okay it still looks like it flew out there really nicely yeah it got up there pretty well yeah it your ball your ball speed did dip your spin also dropped down to just over 4,000 that time what happened to the peak height there but the peak height did stay up it’s 99 feet wow so and it looked like it was kind of high on that one so again we’re using we’re using the range balls here at Les Bola which are actually I mean they’re good conditioned range balls so but that is something to note in terms of the launch and stuff I think typically range balls might launch a little bit higher maybe with a little bit typically or more spin consistent yeah some of them are it’s not it’s not a Prov one that we’re hitting abely I’ll say that um okay good numbers so far though I go a little higher yeah it did 107 on that Peak height your aage smash Factor’s pretty good at 135 you’re hitting it pretty solid there take that 183 on that carry I don’t even know how much more we need to see out of this club Jake’s got his swing going today feel preno Pro 245 is doing pretty well for us here all right that’s that’s really good stuff there from the Muno Pro 245 um in terms of the feel we talked a little bit about feel um is it you know in the in the beginning there we said the Muno Pro 245 in terms of player resistance iron very soft feeling um I imagine that stayed true here and even on the shots where you maybe didn’t quite hit it in the center of the face does it still feel pretty good for you for sure yeah I mean it felt very soft very muted even the one that I caught a little high in the face I could tell just from the turf interaction but I didn’t feel it too much this okay very soft overall feeling Club yeah yeah very good yeah that’s it’s pretty similar feedback to what we’ve heard just throughout you know the whole spring into summer here with Muno Pro iron so let’s go through some through some averages here and this is all I mean it’s pretty consistent I mean you can see your dispersion there you’re pretty pretty tight there you know couple that one that carried a little shorter then you got one that went that one I see was 185 carry which is the longest uh so your average on the carryer is 182 your average spin rate was 5123 so just over 5,000 which I think is probably expected um in this category for someone like you um you know you’re compressing the bar really well and that’s going to be lower spinning than something you’re probably used to smash Factor average 135 very good launch angle at an average of 18 degrees okay so uh that seems like it fits in pretty well average Peak height of 105 yeah that’s great so and and for what it’s worth the total average I know we like to focus on carry yeah but um the full swing launch monitor is is uh kind of reading some roll out of two so the average total distance of 194 yeah so does that kind of fit in with everything that you would have expected ball speed by the way 24.7 yeah I mean that’s right around kind of where I expected this iron to be at 30 de of Loft um definitely a little hotter than what I might typically play but didn’t seem like we suffered too much in its consistency no no not and that’s actually what I wanted to bring up was the carry distance here so I’ve got the carry distances of the five shots 181 179 181 183 185 yeah I’ll take that so that’s pretty good like you you’re hitting you know again you didn’t hit those the exact perfect every time maybe a slight miss a couple times and it was you’re still within three four yards of the average every single time I take that all day long so that is terrific stuff from the bazo pro 245 um should we transition now i530 let’s first I’ll have you pick it up and maybe we’ll do a quick kind of head-to-head here what you think in terms of difference on the appearance of that one yeah so I mean bigger overall size but not offputting okay it’s not some big honking Club where I look down like yeah I don’t know if I can play this I could definitely get used to this iron especially like in a four iron I play the I 230s myself so this would be a great kind of place to combo that as well um you see that kind of traditional white line for pink I love that it really helps you square up the face there okay and do you notice one thing I’ve I’ve always taken note of with these recent ping iron releases is the grooves they have the micro Max grooves 100% a lot more grooves on the face you see more grooves okay yeah and and is that I mean it’s not like it’s just disturbing or anything but it’s something that I feel like a lot of players um if they’re you know if they notice things of the appearance of the club that’s probably one thing they’re going to see right away is see a lot of GRS on the face all right let’s uh let’s hit some shots here we got the Ping i537 [Music] iron that was a little skinny okay interesting that you say that because the ball speed was much higher I believe than anything that now granted the loft is a Little Bit Stronger it much uh higher ball speed than the Muno yeah that was 128 on the ball speed so yeah this thing is real good at generating ball speed I also noticed and again was that one hit a little bit more square or yeah okay it’s cuz I noticed on that one um the sound was a little bit it’s like louder than the Muno Pro I think for sure there’s it’s definitely a little more audible mhm yeah with that one spin went up a little bit so you’re kind of your average right now at the spin on those two shots 6600 yeah so you’re up quite a bit on the spin yeah I think those Gs are helping little pull there see what that does to the numbers here ball speed is still staying up there though I mean that one was at 25.9 the spin is also higher which is interesting we’re a stronger lofted Club here but that spin is still I it seems like it so far is Comfortably higher than the Muno Pro yes I mean this has a very very low center of gravity that’s how it launches the ball so High um not surprised to see that spin right again with these GRS on here that was towy okay that we’ll see what that brings to spin down not really though no that’s it’s just over 6,000 yeah your average is 6406 for the spin sh easy to hit yeah that’s uh I’m I’m impressed with that in the sense that it’s still generating Spin and launch being stronger lofted that one I caught real well you caught real well yeah yeah you got over 130 miles hour on the ball speed there that’s really really good stuff um so yeah we got to go through here and talk about some of these numbers so you’re it’s interesting because the average on the carry there was 181 yeah so it’s pretty similar to in terms of the distance but the spin is much higher at 6301 yeah compared to it was just over 5,000 with uh the Muno Pro yeah so I guess in terms of feel as well is there a you feel a big difference between the two or I mean it’s not quite as soft but this doesn’t feel bad by any means I again I’m used to playing ping irons this feels very familiar this is plenty soft for me there are some people that really want to feel like you’re hitting a marshmallow may be leaned more toward that Muno but this does a really really good job of generating launch angle spin if you’re a player that struggles getting the ball up in the air this is a great place to go yeah I mean your average height was 108 so higher than Theo Pro um and we talked about spin that was 6301 compared to just over 5,000 so that’s a lot more spin um and then the ball speed to higher ball speed with this you mentioned that it was a hot club it clearly is 127.66 yeah with the Muno Pro and I love seeing more spin out of a club with higher ball speed that spin rate’s going to help you more consistent on your carry distance you really want to try and avoid Flyers with this club you get that low spin knuckler it goes 15 yards over the green that can be a round killer so seeing a higher spin rate increasing that consistency is really good to see yep yep exactly one thing I wanted to show too bring up again is we talked about the consistency of carry distance from the waso pro right it was you know we were talking about you know 179 181 a couple times it was pretty similar with the i530 it was 183 176 and 178 then after that a couple not quite perfect strikes and then 180 187 so you’re still in a kind of a 9ish yard window there where your ball is going to be flying most of the time and you were hitting the ball pretty solid for the most part but you had a couple there that you didn’t quite catch I thought you commented on so I think this is a good test because it shows two similar irons but I think there’s different characteristics of them in each of them that make them pretty distinct from each other yeah absolutely yeah I think if you were like I guess if you were to maybe categorize these these irons for different types of golfers because there’s definitely advantages to both of them you know starting with mzo Pro let’s go there which you know if you looking for something what would you find out of that iron so the way that I would typically describe these to people is if you going from a more bladed Style Iron into something more forgiving I would lean towards that 245 yeah that’s going to give you more traditional shaping you’re used to a similar feel generally those players generate enough spin on their own that they could play a little lower spin iron whereas if you’re going from a game improvement more to a player’s distance i530 be great this is still going to help you generate ball speed generate spin but little smaller profile better feel better look I like that that’s a really good way to think of it because it’s you talk about players category a lot of irons out there a lot of things get go into those similar shape but we saw a lot of differences in this test here so two great options for sure though Muno Pro 245 ping i530 both are available to get fit at second swing with someone like Jake here in the fitting Bay make sure you schedule that fitting get your iron game Dial in with one of these models and uh Jake thank you for taking the time to hit some shots out here this is a pretty good test right here yeah a lot of fun [Music]