Product review (3 stars): Looks good; operates loud
Just got this microwave today,which was quite fast. It arrived unscathed despite the dents and holes in the outside packaging material. It looks good, although the same basic box they all are, and I do like the glossy black on the doors. Thus far, it seems to do what it is supposed to do; however, it is far less easy to use and significantly less well engineered/designed than the almost 12 year old Sharp it replaces. The fact that it's many times louder than my old Sharp is most annoying and inexcusable. Additionally, unlike the ancient Sharp used as my reference, it does not allow one to disable the tones it emits when one uses the keypad or when the appliance alerts one that it has completed the job at hand. (And, from my vantage, those tones are overly loud as well.) The Sharp also basically had all the features this one has, except the inverter defrost, and was much more intuitive to use and, overall, required fewer steps to accomplish the same results. In summary, I suspect that this will function quite adequately for me and I will get used to its noisy operations. However, I also expect that I will not keep it for its full life, i.e., not anywhere near as long as the Sharp, and will almost certainly go back to a product made by Sharp.