I hope you are right, and the Deus shakes up the industry a little bit and other companies start using a more intuitive design. It feels like the more established companies are riding their success and churning out detectors with slight upgrades and some bells and whistles instead of focusing on real R&D to push the limits.
Indeed.
Last weekend, the point was really driven home for me. It was raining. It rains 8 months out of the year here. The E-Trac screen is basically invisible if it's not perfectly sunny and the sun's not at the right angle. That means June, July, and August if I'm walking in the correct direction. Even the backlight didn't make the screen visible this time, and why should it be? My watch is brighter. My Kindle is brighter. (My Kindle does not have a backlight and is not in color.) My girlfriend's Deus, on the other hand, was easily seen. It also doesn't go beserk in the rain when the coil is tilted, its batteries are fairly high quality, it's light, it's waterproof, and that wireless thing is pretty nice as well.
The E-Trac is a $1600 effing machine. Why the hell is the screen so lousy? There is no excuse for that, and there's no excuse for some of the other problems as well. Great guts, but problems everywhere else. They haven't fixed it because they haven't needed to, but it needs fixing, especially that damned screen. It will take innovators (and lost market share) to force such a change. I can forgive a lot of those problems but the screen is becoming a game-breaker. I have a calculator from 1996 with a display that's easier to read than this. Upgrading the screen would not make the detector work less well. Why? Why is it so bad?
I'm shopping around for a Deus now...not because it's necessarily a more capable machine, but because I can read the frigging screen whenever I want to. The E-Trac is nearly unusable in this area a lot of the time, but the Deus is always readable. Yes, I know, hunt by sound, yadda yadda yadda, but if you're in TTF on the E-Trac, you're not hunting by sound, and if you can't read the display, you're stuck with 4 tone conductive. And if the ground conditions forced you to try TTF because 4TC couldn't work...well, you might as well go home, or dig 5000 holes, or sit back in a dry spot and watch your girlfriend have fun digging up good stuff with her Deus. You're not looking for coins and jewelry anymore. You're looking for whatever you can get. Welcome to bottlecap hell.
So yeah, I think that the Deus is a good machine. I think it's a very good machine in western WA. YMMV. I'm praying that Minelab learns a few lessons from XP.
A useful thought experiment for both sides of the fence would be this: assume that the whole hardware/software detection package for the E-Trac and the Deus is exactly the same, with the actual machines being different. They can detect the same targets equally deeply, although the interfaces and customization features remain as they are today, as do physical sizes, configurations, and weights. Which do you want? And why the hell is Minelab not paying attention to this?