My first machine was a Fisher 1212x & for the money it is one little bad machine, I still have it for friends or landowners to use, I have no experience with Fishers high end. I owned a Garrett GTI 2500
for 5 years, I was very brand loyal but after 5 years of consistent butt whippings from a xlt & a nautilus & the 2500 locking up on me in cold weather (under 25 degrees), this one really made me mad because my partner Jim Weaver (xlt) was digging old coins left & right & their i was with a locked up machine, This happened about 4 other times to me but without the coins part, I would turn the thing off, remove the battery pack, re-boot all the things they told me to do at the factory, nothing would work except for warming the thing up. Jim & I would often compare signals & when it read iron on my 2500 it was always iron except this one time,I was getting a bouncy iron signal & would not have dug it in a hundred years, that damn Weaver with his xlt hears enough of a coin to decide to dig it. the hole had square nails in it along with a key date Barber dime worth about $350.00. The 2500 discriminates against iron to much.The 2500 is a touch & go machine, it's ok for a weekend hunter, If you are serious about coins i say get you a xlt, it's tweekable, you can set it to your conditions. Now for that nasty Nautilus, you ain't going beat it on depth, I have seen my other partner Jim Armstrong with his Nauti dig small thin Spanish silver at 10 inches that Weaver & I had been over 100 times with our xlts, But we got him in the trashy areas-I think? What ever you get make sure you have tone id, sound is your best clue. To be fair to the 2500 i just remembered that i did dig on 2 different occasions mercs after Weaver & his xlt, one of them for sure because he mulled around the hole for a few minutes so i went over it after he walked off, I hit it from a different direction, It's one of my favorite coins for that reason, 1941.
