My Brothe, Uncle and I all have an Ace 250. It has been 4 Months with it and it is the worst I've owned. They both agree as well. 1 of 20 are false readings. HIGHLY innacurate pinpointing. Size and depth register is WAY off. Garrett is a good company, but the 250 is a complete bomb. You get what you pay for and honestly it's price is way too high. The tiume we have all wasted is a horrible thing. I've put in an e-mail to Garrett about this and have yet to receive a response. I will be calling them. I will return it and go with a different company and a higher quality detector. The accuracy reminds me of the childs Fisher model that I purchased at Radio Shack in the 80's. Actually, I had much more luck with that. I live in Virginia along the James and surrounded by Civil War sites and have found not one single shred of an artifact after 3 weeks of all day and every day detecting. Something not right. My advice is this. If you are looking for a good detector, go with one within the $900-1500 range. Very dissapointed with this model.
wow! after reading that review, i was initially wondering if you had batteries in your machine and if you've tried using the "power" button when you start detecting?
i've got the 250 and no problem with it what-so-ever!
if your sensitivity is set too high, you might encounter some falsing with it. try running it at around 4 or 5 and it should work just fine. if you're in a really trashy area, yes pin-pointing can be a bit tricky. but that's where a Pro Pointer would come in really handy and you'd be surprised how many different targets can be hiding in one 4 inch diameter hole. but with some practice, the 250 will do a pretty good job with the pin pointing.
also, for the id and depth indicators, that's meant to be mainly "coin sized" objects. a tiny little rusted nail or a big horse shoe in the ground are most certainly going to show up as different readings on your display than a quarter will.
it just sounds like you're expecting miracles and silver and gold coins with it, where instead, you probably just need some more
practice with it and get the learning curve out of the way by putting some honest to goodness TIME into it.
it's supposed to be a "fun" hobby and if you're finding it and getting that frustrated with it, maybe it's just not
your hobby.
there are some excellent videos on youtube, more than a score of folks on here how have mastered the Ace and between both of those, many of us have learned our machines capabilities and are more than satisfied with the 250.