We love our Polaris 9300. It's also expensive but we got it with a rebate, so that helped. When we buy a new one, we'll spring for the one with the remote control, because sometimes the robot is very irritatingly driving past the same leaf over and over. JUST PICK UP THE LEAF ALREADY!
Remote control: problem solved. DH thinks for a robot, pool cleaners are stupid. He wants it to map the pool and know where its already cleaned and where the edges and steps are - I think he spends too much time on the latest science tech sites and expects those discoveries to have trickled down to the pool robot category, but they just haven't yet.
We liked the Polaris because it had a very fine filter inside, and cloudy water/fine red dust from Oklahoma winds were two of our key problem areas in addition to large amounts of leaves blowing in. We needed large and small debris to be cleaned up. We didn't have to add anything special to Polaris get the really fine filtration, so we liked that. Two cleaning cycles (long with waterline scrubbing and short with no waterline scrub) have been plenty sufficient for us. With weekly brush scrubbing, we rarely run the long cycle anymore. Need new tires this year, our painted pool and year-round use has done a number on the treads, and it slips and slides in the steeply sloped shallow end.
A surface robot would make my life complete, but I see they are another $600, so if the skimmers don't pick it up and it doesn't get caught in my daily/every other day manual skim, I wait for it to hit the floor and send the robot after it.
