Product review (3 stars): Nice, but fancy features are just hype
The two ovens are both usable, for the wide coursing of the heating elements produced uniform heat in both, even when placing a baking sheet on the bottom rack position. But for this price, you darn well should get a few extra inches of heating rod. The fancy extra features have turned me off. 1) The control buttons. There is an array of 9 and an array of four buttons for the upper over, and a symmetrical array of 4 and 9 for the right. The arrays of 4 are identical; that's good. But in the larger 9-button arrays, only the warm button is in the same place on the two arrays. The buttons you will typically use (bake button, oven light button, broil, etc) are in different places on the two arrays, and so even once you are familiar with the oven, you will be hunting and pecking. 2) The manual. It reads like a computer software manual ("for the pizza feature, select the pizza button"). It does not explain why you would want to select a "pizza feature" instead of just using "bake". Is it hotter? - No, the max temp is still 550F. What's the difference between the separate settings for fresh pizza or frozen? The manual says that "1" is for fresh, "2" is for frozen. Well, that certainly explains it to full intellectual satisfaction. Moving on to the slow cook settings; neither the manual nor the oven display reveals the temperature, but you are asked to select among four types of food and two heat levels. I used a calibrated oven and a long temperature probe to measure the temperature of 4 quarts of water, heating in a 5.5 qt ceramic slow-cook covered pot. When set to "stew" and "Lo" and "7 hr cook time", the water reached 202F by 2 hrs, full simmer of 207F at 2.5 hr, 203 F at 3 hrs, and then dropped slowly, dropping below 200F by 3.5 hr. I don't know of a cook , hoping to retain nutrients and proper food texture by a low temp slow-cooking method, who would choose to nearly boil the stew for over an hour. Using 2 quarts caused hours of frank boiling. When I tried the "beef" and "Hi" setting on 4 quarts of water, it reached 209F by 2 hr and dropped to 200F only by 3.5 hr. Any beef would be cardboard texture by then. Moving on to the "roast convection", this has nothing to do with roasting (which involves an oiled food in a uniform very hot oven). Instead, the top heating element comes on, which if not used very briefly, will char the topmost part of your otherwise evenly browned food. It is best used when one wants a broiled effect, but desires to keep the door closed. As long as GE won't engage the consumer by providing a mechanistic explanation of its dozens of settings, I would plan on using the ovens only in broil, bake, and convection modes.