According to their own reports most detector rental agencies rent out.....
Compadres... than anything else.
Guess why. Yes, that's right, because not only do people have better success with the Compadres, they also hold up better with abuse than the Aces.
I've owned both an Ace 250 AND a Compadre which I used just yesterday, and between the two I'd rather hear the instantaneous high-pitched "beep" of the Compadre than the horribly annoying delayed "boing, boing, boing" of the Ace. The compadre does much better on salt/iron beaches and it pinpoints and finds tinier items than the Ace too. The Compadre works in any soil anywhere but the Aces really suck in high-iron soil. The Compadre can be used to hunt nuggets but the Aces don't quite cut it. The Ace 150 and 250 have identical circuitry but the Ace 250 has a wider increment adjustment available.
But I'd chose the Fisher 1236-x2 over either one of them. It goes deeper and with it's excellent iron blanking/noise supressing control it cancels iron junk better than either one of them.
LL