DeLonghi Magnifica Evo Next ECAM310.80.TB

My Dinamica packed it in, stuck between telling me I had not placed the brew Unit in, to just not working, because well, it won't work if it thinks the brew unit is missing. Now there are a number of colours with this machine and another model the 312.80 which to all intent and purpose is exactly the same machine. The thing I liked was the new screen being in the angled position and having lighting and pictures for idiots' display. Actually there is no backlighting here just a screen which lights up , that's a shame really, backlighting the icons is needed.

Once you plug it in it walks you through the setup on the screen at the top. I use filtered water and my water is soft so I left the filter out.

The milk jug is a little different from my previous machine with only one foam setting but it is fine and probably is the setting I would use any way if I had a multi choice. There is a sensor near the bottom of the unit that can tell if you have milk in the container or not.

The hot setting and the medium setting for the water, were way too hot for my taste, so I dialed in the low setting and chose five beans for my intensity and chose 5 to 6 on the grind setting. I tried a finer grind, but I thought it would blow up straining to pass water through it.

The pad on top of the machine might be for just placing your cups there with no heating , I guess, but I would not do that as there is no lip to stop them from falling off. If it heats your cup I would be surprised, my old Dinamica did, but it was chrome and I could feel the heat , but this one, I could not feel anything.

The one thing I struggled with was how the heck do I put in my own quantities and save it to the profile.? After much reading on the web, I finally found the answer.

By default you are Profile one , so, what you do is this, you select your drink, you select the intensity and then you hit the MY button and the machine then surrenders to your whim and walks you through to the quantities you chose , hit OK to stop the fill and then it offers to save those settings .

You can thank me later for all the groundwork I did to nail this down. As I have different size mugs for different drinks I was thankful that I got to use those mugs to suit my taste. In the end it was all good and the machine now delivers what I want.

My only gripe with DeLonghi apart from poor documentation is that the machines do not seem to last with 4 years being my record so far, but then when I think back to my Jura it didn't last that long either and was 3 times the price at the time. And to be honest the coffee was no better nor worse. Still though, if it lasts 3 years that's a dollar a day so that's cheap right ?

I recommend this machine with the caveat I may come back and re assess my thoughts if it gives me any angst.