John,
I would highly recommend against trying to save some money and going with the X instead of the XS. Fergs has told you some of the things you'll be missing out on, but not everything. For example, you'll probably quickly get tired of feeding the machine those expensive alkalines, and you can't use regular rechargeables in the battery pack because you wouldn't have enough voltage. So you would probably go out and buy the charger and battery pack that comes standard with the XS. The going rate right now I think in US dollars is $65 for the battery pack, $40 for the home charger and $40 for the car charger. So right off the bat, there is half of the money you are talking about saving. You'll end up putting it right back into the battery system. In addition to the learn function, you will be without the edit function that you use to "fine tune" the discrimination patterns. And you WILL NOT be able to save your custom discrimination patterns. The Explorer XS allows you to save 6 patterns. For example, I have my "coins only" pattern that I generated by teaching the machine via the learn function to accept only the types of coins I wanted. Sometimes, I only have a half hour or so to spend at the local school, and I only want to try and quickly find a couple of silver coins or old wheaties. I don't want to be distracted by those tempting low tones that could be indicative of jewelry. I load my "coins only" pattern and try to find a couple of quick keepers in the alloted search time. At other times, it is just the opposite. I go to the school with the idea to try and find some jewelry, loading my "jewelry only" custom pattern which ignores almost all of the coins. And like Fergs said, I also use the noise cancellation feature a lot. Sometimes I hunt around power lines, and if you want to pump up the sensitivity, you often have to find a real clean channel. Doing this manually (running through 10 channels and trying to figure out the cleanest) would surely take some time. Any by the time you get to the 10th channel, I don't know how you remember which was the cleanest. With the noise cancellation feature, I place the coil in its search position, press the button, listen to the music as it plays a short tune for each of the channels it checks, and within a minute, I am using the optimum channel for the hunting condition.
