Right out of the box the look of the crock pot was impressive. The stainless steel fits in nicely with my kitchen. The unit itself is pretty straightforward in terms of use. There are three settings, high, warm and low. The timer can be set increments of a half hour. It probably would be better in increments of 15 for long cooking cycles . I do like the feature of it switching to warm after the cooking time is reached but it seems that the temperature is still a little bit to high on warm because my food was still boiling on warm. The size of the cooking insert is big enough to hold a small ham and 10 pork chops and all was cooked evenly and true to the time it stated in the recipe. I do wish there was another insert possibly not as deep or one split into two sides for smaller