so it seems there's a bit of a pissing match between the founder of valentine one and the author of radartest.com. what it boils down to is personal preference, since the valentine-1 and the passport seem to come out even in both range and detection. consumersearch.com seems to have fairly unbiased thoughts on the topic as well.
i stay with the valentine since it does really help to know where the radar is coming from, and no other detector has directional indicators. also it seems that in car and drivers latest test the valentine one rocked. in the end, i love my valentine enought to buy another one for my next car, even though it's $100 more expensive than anything else.
why police radar instant-on POP mode is prone to errors.
why valentine one radar detectors are spiffy.
an excerp from consumersearch.com:
While we're used to seeing heated competition among makers of radar detectors (particularly between Valentine and Escort), we didn't anticipate the head-butting we observed among reviewers of radar detectors. Whether you're reading test results at RadarTest.com, SpeedZones.com or Car and Driver magazine, you'll notice some none-too-subtle jabs at the other reviewers in the field. Not surprisingly, all three claim to offer the most unbiased testing of radar detectors, albeit with somewhat different methodology and policies.
Some reviewers accuse Car and Driver of having a decided bias in favor of Valentine; others accuse SpeedTest.com of fostering potential bias because it charges manufacturers a testing fee, and RadarTest.com gets the Inquisition treatment for accepting sample products from manufacturers for evaluation. In our research, we found all three of these charges to be mitigated by other factors.
Car and Driver, for example, bases part of its glowing review of the Valentine One on a set of features that other reviewers just don't care about that much (some lighted directional arrows and a bogey counter). SpeedTest.com does collect a standard fee from manufacturers, but due to the amount of critical information we found on this site, we find it hard to believe that SpeedZones would be taking payoffs for good reviews—in fact, testing for some models (whose manufacturers presumably ponied up the testing fee) receive downright poor scores. Finally, RadarTest.com (as well as SpeedZones.com) does accept sample products from manufacturers for testing, but both organizations also separately purchase blind samples to make sure manufacturer-supplied units haven't been 'juiced.'
And generally, all three reviewers get similar results from radar detectors. In fact, performance of individual models at all three sites usually fell within a pretty narrow range, and no reviewer's test results varied so much from another reviewer's that we suspected any hanky-panky. Although RadarTest.com, SpeedZones.com and Car and Driver may want you to think differently, we felt that all three publications took a well-reasoned, insightful stab at evaluating radar detectors and laser jammers in the most conscientious way they knew how.
We did find one topic with virtually no dissention, that laser/radar jammers from Rocky Mountain Radar (*est. $180 to $400) don't work. In lengthy articles at RadarTest.com and SpeedZones.com, Rocky Mountain Radar models fail to jam any radar or laser aimed at the test vehicle (attempting to jam radar guns is illegal in all states, but jamming laser guns is perfectly legal in states where radar detectors aren't prohibited). Rocky Mountain Radar claims to mix white noise with the oncoming beam from a laser or radar gun, deflecting back only confusing noise to law enforcement, thereby making a vehicle 'invisible' to laser and radar speed measurement. In measured testing, Rocky Mountain models, including the Phazer II, Eclipse and Mini-D models, did show some capacity for radar and laser detection—but no jamming ability whatsoever. See the articles at SpeedTest.com and RadarTest.com for more commentary and analysis on Rocky Mountain Radar if considering one of those units.