PNI Steel Eye RW3000
($149.95 suggested retail)
The case of the new PNI Steel Eye resembles the Silver Bullet's only slightly fatter and longer. Unlike the Silver Bullet, the Steel Eye's two AA batteries fit inside its case, a major improvement. And there's somewhat less shiny metal on top, although windshield glare is still a significant problem.
The Steel Eye has a power cord jack and can operate without the supplied AA batteries. Performance is unchanged when the power cord is attached. It ships with Velcro for dash-mounting and a windshield bracket that, fortunately, works far better than the Silver Bullet's.
Unlike the Silver Bullet, the Steel Eye's display is a bright red LED with differently colored icons for band ID and numerical signal strength, a major improvement. It also has a status icon to let you know it's powered-up and working, something else the Silver Bullet lacked. The control buttons are also much larger and far more accessible.
The Steel Eye has a basic feature set: three-step display brightness adjustment, auto mute, low-battery audio/visual warning, Filter (city) mode and tutorial mode. It has an earphone jack, a nice touch, and a big rotary volume control, making it the easiest of the bunch to adjust with speed and accuracy.
The Steel Eye detects the MPH BEE III Ka-band radar in POP mode and does so extremely well - at least at very close range. But since it's able to detect the BEE III from less than a mile away under ideal conditions (this translates to a few hundred feet under less ideal circumstances), its POP-detecting capability is largely wasted. The BEE III is one radar you'll need to know about much farther in advance because when you're already that close, it's highly likely you'll be the next customer.
Like the Silver Bullet, the Steel Eye is very slow to react to radar in non-POP mode, often missing the short bursts of instant-on radar. Set in POP mode, that shortcoming disappears. But false alarms go up.
The Steel Eye has excellent K-band sensitivity and its averaged Ka-band sensitivity is almost identical to the Whistler 1788's. But it has a problem on X band. Namely, it can't detect it. We got a brief full-level alert at 612 feet - about 1,000 feet after the radar locked-in a speed - and then it fell silent, not alerting again even when we parked next to the radar vehicle. In Filter mode it does worse: there's no X-band detection at all.
Bottom line: a big improvement over the Silver Bullet but wildly uneven in performance, making it a risky bet.
Rating: 2 Stars
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