OGASAKA held the TC-S's sidecut and reworked what sits behind it. In its own words, the construction materials and the flex-and-torsion balance were revised down to the finest details, while 116.0-65.0-102.0 mm carried across untouched. The published half-set figure moved with the rest, from 1,018 to 970 g/m — grams for every meter of one ski, not a pair. One caution if you go cross-checking: OGASAKA's English site still serves the previous ski by default, listing 1,018 g/m and the discontinued SR585 plate.

We found no English-language review of this ski. The record is Japanese: nine testers, twelve rides, and every one of those rides was on the 165 cm. Two of the findings carry more than a single voice. The first is a surprise at this width — it skids. An instructor who opened on slow snowplow turns found the release smooth and controllable to exactly the width he asked for, and a shop tester said sideways movement came more easily than on other makers. The second is where the ski wants your weight. It is nose-led and emphatic about it: one tester read it as a heavyweight you enter from the tip, closer to an SL race ski than to the lighter, foot-led designs this class has been drifting toward.

Then the record splits, and blending it would be dishonest. Four testers read the tip four ways. One rated its greater flex a virtue and used it to build turn size sideways in high-speed short turns. One, riding two different setups, found the tip absent — undulating over every ripple, never settling. A third found torsional stiffness high, the ski turning hard the moment the edge caught. A fourth could not make it bend at all, so the arc came out at whatever the sidecut dictated. The instructor's own conclusion is the honest summary: the positional sweet spot is narrow by design, and getting onto the tip at turn entry is not optional.

The plate decision spans $290 and it is not purely money. OGASAKA publishes no functional claim whatsoever for the FM585 — height, weight, material, country of origin, price, that is the whole entry — so everything written about its character comes from testers alone. The SRED is new this season and is printed against this ski at 520 g, its short-turn configuration, against the 530 g long-turn one the TC-L gets. Three of the five testers who rode the SRED read it as the sharper plate; only one of them compared setups on a single day.

Cross-shopping stays inside OGASAKA. The KEO'S KS-AP2 shares the lengths, near-identical radii and the same aluminum build for $60 less in matching setups, on an all-around brief rather than a competition one. Sizing is geometry, not testing: nobody has published a ride on the 155, the 160 or the 170.