Product review (5 stars): Huge interior, cooks wonderfully, lots of features
We purchased this Bosch oven from a local appliance store a bit over a year ago, replacing a 20-year-old Whirlpool that my wife hated due to its uneven cooking. When we were shopping, we took along with us a large pizza pan that we often use. It had fit in the Whirlpool but did not fit in many of the ovens we looked at.  This Bosch not only fit the pan nicely, it did so even though it also featured convection cooking and had the widest and tallest cavity we had seen.  The icing on the cake was that the heating elements were completely concealed, giving maximum space and easy cleanup.

I had a preference for this "500 Series" model over the more expensive "800 Series" because I dislike full-touchpad interfaces.  The Bosch HBL5460 uses two rotary knobs that can be pushed in to be flush with the panel when not in use.  The left knob selects the operation mode and the right is used to make adjustments.  Touch buttons are used to do things such as start, stop and pause, turn on the light and select other options. A large display (vacuum fluorescent I think) displays information in clear and bright orange characters.  (Two minor gripes about this display: first, there is a faint but distinct orange glow from the whole display no matter what is displayed, and ours has a thin vertical dark line bisecting the display.  This line isn't really noticeable in use, but it looks a bit odd.)  When the oven is not on, the display shows the current date and time.

The cooking mode dial has many options, some of which I have yet to fully "grok".  There's the standard Bake, Broil and Roast, with convection variants as well. There are also "True Convection" and "Speed Convection" - the latter also uses the top and bottom elements.  There are two modes for specific foods - Pizza and Pie - which preset temperatures and use the convection fan. There's also a "Recipe" setting, that I have yet to use, which lets you select from a variety of food types and weights and it presets temperature and time, as well as advising you which rack position to use. Lastly, there are modes for Dehydrate, Proof (for dough rising), Warm, and Self Clean.  With all the modes, while it sets an initial temperature, you can change the temperature up and down as desired.

A typical session is to push on the knobs to let them pop out, turn the mode dial to select the mode you want, and then turn the settings knob to make adjustments.  For modes with more than one adjustment, you use the up and down touchpad buttons to select the thing to adjust.  When you are done, press Start.  It will first go into a preheat mode and beep when it has reached the selected temperature (though in our experience this tends to be about 25 degrees lower than the setting.)  The current temperature is shown in the display.

There is a timer, of course.  You press the timer button, and then use the dial to adjust the time.  One confusing thing is that the display says "Press Timer again to Quit", but here, "Quit" means "start the timer.  You can also set cook time and either an End or Start time to delay the start of cooking.  When you set an End time, it figures out when to start based on the cooking time you entered.

A temperature probe is included - this plugs into a jack on the left wall, and you can set the desired probe temperature for a roast.  In my experience this worked perfectly and the temperature matched what a separate thermometer said.  One feature I had never heard of before is a "Sabbath Mode".  This "enables those of particular faiths to use their ovens on the Sabbath", since these faiths prohibit use of mechanical devices on the Sabbath.  The way this works is the oven uses a preset temperature of 190F and lets you set a duration between 24 and 74 hours.  The idea is that it's ok if a machine does the work as long as you did nothing, on the Sabbath, to request it.  In some communities, buildings have "Sabbath elevators" that automatically stop on every floor on the Sabbath.

Lastly, there is some customization of operation available, such as the length of beeps, whether the keypad beeps when pressed, language, temperature unit and of course date and time.  A nice plus is that if you find the oven consistently overcooks or undercooks, you can set a "temperature offset" that raises or lowers the actual oven temperature by this value.  In my experience, the temperatures were right on target so I don't use this feature.

Ok, enough about the knobs - how does this thing cook?  Wonderfully!  Everything we have done in it has come out great.  Roasting, baking, broiling, all evenly done and just right. And the oven light is bright and clear, with the contents easily visible through the door.  (I think the black model works better than the white one for this.)

I installed the oven myself and was curious to note that the height of the whole oven was three inches less than that of the Whirlpool it replaced, yet the oven cavity was larger. Unlike most ovens which let heat escape through a vent near the top of the door, this model has a fan that draws cool air in and exhausts warm air through a grille at the bottom.  (Our cats love this feature.)

Do I have any gripes?  A few, but they are minor.  I already mentioned the confusing instructions for the timer.  Also, I have occasionally bumped the mode knob to change it to a different mode, and when I put it back I had to press Start again, otherwise it stopped cooking.  The manual is detailed, but raises more questions than it answers about which mode to select, as several of them seem very similar.  None of this is important and the oven has performed wonderfully for us for over a year.  I will note that at the same time we put this in, we replaced our similarly-aged dishwasher and gas cooktop with Bosch models.  The cooktop, an "800 Series", is a winner, the dishwasher, a "500 Series" Consumer Reports is very fond of, is not finding similar favor in this household.  I will write reviews of these in the near future.