A lot of the mid range and higher Bounty Hunters are great deals for the money (I have a BH 3300 Discovery - the fact it can be manually ground balanced allows it to be useable in the highly mineralized Colorado Mountain areas I visit). BH's are sometimes a bit cheaper made than the equivalent Fisher or Teknetics models, but they often use the same general parts (maybe some slight programming differences between the models).
If you get around people with other brands, they may look down on your Bounty Hunter, but most of the people who get good finds tend to be able to get them on hardware that they are used use and have had many hours of experiance with. Is it better than an ACE 250 (hard to say, I don't own any Garrett detectors, but I sure see a lot of people using them)?
I guess it all depends on what you plan to do with it. If its for general Coin and some Relic hunting. it will work fine. If you want to go gold prospecting with it, it's not a good choice (too low an operating frequency for one thing and not good enough at dealing with highly mineralized ground - none of BH's run above 6.8 Khz).
Find a Metal detecting club near you and go to a few meetings - you may be able to find some one who can teach you how to use a detector and how it reacts - people tend to be biased towards what they own, but getting some hands on experience will make you a smarter consumer. From there, figure out what you want to do with it 90% of the time, then consider buying a detector.
I own 8 detectors. 4 are White's, the others are different models for different purposes - I like having tools that are good for different types of detecting - all detectors are compromises; I buy purpose built units for some things (example: Gold hunting), and general purpose for others. I hope to buy a PI type in the next year. I find that after a while you discover that the VDI lies to you (and if you trust it too much you will pass on some great targets).
To answer your original question. I have never tried this model. I would suspect that its an excellent general purpose detector (My BH Discovery 3300 is). Is it what you will actually use? If you have never detected before, its possible it will just end up in a closet some place because it was harder to find good targets than you expected (however, this is true with all new users of detectors). Personally, I would rather try some other detectors in the field and then make a decision.
