I thought really hard about this before getting one. What an earlier post on this thread mentioned is it truly does depend where you drive in the country and the kinds of roads you frequent most. This will in turn help you decide what detector is best.
I, for example, am in Los Angeles where they recently decommissioned ALL red-light cameras (not that I would try to run a red light anyway). So the red light feature on the Passport is theoretically useless for me. It's actually more of an annoyance now as I get alerts when I am on the freeway. I wish I could turn the feature off. Yes, I do own a Passport nonetheless
Why? Well one of the main reasons I never did want to get the V1 is because of all the false alerts. The Passports internal GPS maps your routes and "marks" false alerts automatically. Its a really cool and HELPFUL feature. I love it. My bro uses one in New Jersey and apparently its saved him dozens of times. I do notice that a LOT of people in SoCal swear by the V1. A friend loaned me one one time when I was driving from L.A. to S.F. - I must say, it truly did save me several times on that trip. But to live with it everyday and to have it go off more often than it should is too much for me. Once the Passport "learns", it is almost like it isn't there. I hard-wired mine and its awesome. Note though that whichever you choose, make sure you get Laser shifters or Blinders.
If you say money is no object, I would get both
9500ix for daily work, short freeway and in-town use. Then a V1 for longer road trips on interstates.
I do like my Passport though
The features are pretty awesome:
- Auto Silent - beeps loud at first and then softens
- Auto Learn - learns the false alarms and "stores" them in memory
- 3 diff sensitivity modes - my favorite is "Auto", where it reduces the radar range of X and K bands based on your speed. But keeps KA and Laser on full. Pretty neat feature.
- "mark" feature to manually select areas where you do NOT want your detector to go off.
Those are just some of them. There are so many more that make it worth the $500 investment
Hope this helps with your decision!