Originally Posted by
jimfish98
In my pond I have 4 Shusui. One is clean, decent color, been around for awhile and no plans of letting it go. The other three however I have to let one or two go. In March of 18 I picked up this first one. As you can see from the pic though, there are some sumi spots on it. I have not pulled it recently but still just a few speckles preventing it from being a clean pattern, the beni is vibrant and thick. In the second pic the top two shusui in the pic made it through QT (lower one was a jumper and found a hole in the net). I picked them up this March and both are growing fine like the one from last year. The beni has thinned out and they have that more typical orange/red coloring you see in most shusui (outside of high dollar koi). There are no speckles giving them a cleaner look. The third pick is my old shusui which falls in the same category as the two newer ones of clean but not as vibrant.
The question is, which goes? If you are keeping for enjoyment and not show, do you go with color and minor imperfections or clean but less vibrant beni?