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Bryant Ridge's Analysis: By the early 1980s, the buying public had made it clear that they preferred stainless steel revolvers, so in 1986, Colt upgraded the Trooper Mark V to stainless steel and changed the barrel to a full under-lug-shrouded type. Other than the barrel profile and use of stainless, the gun is the same as the Mark V. Colt named the new model the King Cobra, continuing its use of snake-named revolvers. As a first for Colt, a Cobra head was part of the barrel stamp, breaking with …

Bryant Ridge's Analysis: Colt introduced a new series of stainless steel small-frame revolvers in 1995 to replace the last of the old "D" frame models. The first in the new series was the Colt SF-VI, so named to prevent confusion with the last of the "D" frames still in the distributor's pipeline. In 1996, with the last of the old guns out of the way, Colt changed the name of the SF-VI to the Colt DS-II. This is taken to stand for Colt "Detective Special Two", but Colt never used that designatio …