Originally Posted by kmart

I have some beef with the Campy shifter paddle mechanism and I'm wondering whether I'm doing something wrong or if it's just not for me. Hopefully somebody can 'splain this to me. I will state outright that my Campy experience is limited to a few minutes at a time, on a couple of ocassions. I haven't spent weeks/months getting used to it.

On Campy, the paddle part of the shifter (that shifts to a larger cog/chainring) can be pressed inward to perform a shift, but it can also be pulled closer towards the drops. I'm really not sure what the point of this feature is, but I could imagine somebody pulling the paddle back until it touches the drops and then gripping the bars and paddle together. That way, you could execute a downshift by twisting the hand without lifting a finger from the bars. Ok, seems kind of interesting, but I've never tried this. Also, you would have to twist your wrists pretty far to press the paddle far enough inward and your elbows would be sticking way out by that point, so it seems stupid.

However, when the Campy paddle is used like a Shimano paddle - that is, you just press inward to shift - the finger naturally pulls the paddle backward, making it harder to complete the shift because the paddle "squirms" out of the way. I dunno, maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but that's the feeling I get, and I hate it. On Shimano, the paddle can only be swung to the side, so even if your fingers perform a shift almost in a manner like pulling a gun trigger, the paddle doesn't "squirm", it just goes sideways, and the shift feels smooth.

On another note, the thumb shifters bother me because my thumbs are usually what's holding me to the bars, and I don't like having to shift my weight to the other part of my hand so that my thumb is free to perform an upshift. On Shimano, the thumb stays locked to the bars and the same squeezing or sideways finger motion is used to shift up and down, with little more than a "mouse click" of pressure on the fingers. This just seems better than the hard, awkward thumb/finger twisting motions a Campy shifter requires. Maybe that's as close to a "logical" argument as you can get, but then again, it's mostly a personal ergonomics issue.