Best for the Money $150 range, but an additional $50-150 gains a nice edge.

I am swapping out my Whistler Pro 73 for an Escort 8500. It's not a bad unit. It is everything that it claims to be, and it is everything the tests show it to be, but it falses significantly more than a used Escort 8500 that I purchased on Ebay for $180. The Escort is more quiet, faster, more sensitive, and makes less of a reflection on the windshield than the Pro 73. My Wife recently swapped the Pro 73 that was in her vehicle for the Escort 8500 that I was using, and now she won't let me have the 8500 back. On a recent drive through town, we were each in seperate vehicles, one behind the other. During a cel phone conversation we were able to hear how much false alarming the Whistler Pro 73 was doing while the Escort was silent. When real radar paints you, the Escort quickly comes to life, and though it does not have potentially aggrevating "real voice alert" that takes time to annunnnciate wwwhhhaaattt is hhhaaapennning, the Escort gives a very quick and informative geiger counter type clicking sound that increases in frequency with growing intensity. In conclusion, though the Whistler Pro 73 is nice, I would recommend an old Escort 8500 before a new Whistler Pro 73, and I am currently in the process of swapping my Pro 73 for an Escort 8500 X50 (which is even 50% better than the non-X50). The $300 for a spanking new Escort 8500 X50 or Bel RX65 (a near twin of the 8500) may be hard to justify, and even harder to afford, the silence of nearly no false alarms is golden, and a used 8500 v/s a Pro73 is like comparing a slightly used Lexus 300 to a new Chevy Lumina.

PS. If a traffic control officer decides that he wants your speed reading, and he plans his surveilence well, no radar detector will save you from that ticket...do your research... radars are high tech and so are radar detectors. There are also varius ways of non-radar speed monitoring, and there are some radar guns that will display your speed before you have time to get off the gas, but a radar detector can quickly earn its keep by preventing the inevitable "day dreaming into a lazy speed trap". Having a "low to no false alarm" detector steadily teaches that silence is golden. A noicy chicken little type detector can numb your mind into ignoring the real threat when it occurs.