In a perfect world, the ultimate radar/lidar detector would sniff out only police radar or lidar, pinpoint its location, and then concisely communicate that information back to you. Although such a device doesn't yet exist, the Valentine One comes the closest to that ideal and thus ranks highest in this test of top-notch detectors.

In highway mode, the Valentine One could detect X-band radar from almost two miles away and K- and Ka-band radar from about a mile and a half. Only the Escort Passport in Ka-band came close to the Valentine's range in highway mode.

Falsing in highway mode is a common occurrence with most of these detectors-the average in our tests was 12.5 falses-and the Valentine One scored poorer for the 14-mile course, at 14 false alarms. The Valentine has two city-mode filters, and switching to its "most filtered" setting reduced the number of falses to eight (the city-mode average for falses was 6.7). That's still a few more than we'd like, but the Valentine's patented radar-direction arrows and bogy counter made it easy to decide which warnings to worry about. The LED arrows indicate whether the radar source is ahead, beside, or behind you, and the numeric display tracks the number of sources. We've said this before and it's still true: Once you live with the arrows, you'll wonder how you ever managed without them.

The Valentine One's ability to detect lidar was slightly better than its performance in our '97 face-off. It still has, by a large margin, the widest angle of view both front and rear. Facing forward, only the Passport matched its ability to find the laser beam's edge at 1000 feet.

The big change to the Valentine is that all the electronics have been packaged into a first-generation "thin" case. In previous models, the addition of laser-detection sensors had forced Valentine to use a thicker, bulkier case. A column of LEDs to the right of the numeric display indicates what the threat is, radar or lidar, and a row of LEDs under the display shows its strength. Power and volume are controlled by a rotary knob. Pushing on the knob changes the city filter modes and also mutes the audio warning.

The Valentine was invisible to the VG-2 detector detector, and it also didn't set off other detectors.