Panasonic NN-CD87KSQPQ

I regret buying this oven – When I was in the market for a new convection microwave oven to replace my 18 year old Sharp, the Panasonic NN-CD87KS had great international reviews. This is my third convection microwave oven in nearly 30 years. The main oven in the kitchen is a fuel stove that is only used occasionally. An oven with a fairly large turntable was required as I do a fair bit of cooking biscuits and I like to fit as many as I can onto the baking tray. This oven has a reasonable sized turntable and it is able to take my existing round baking trays.

The box it comes in is attractive and sturdy, unfortunately polystyrene has been used for packing and that is not recyclable where I live in regional NSW. The oven seems to be well made and to be good quality. It does quite a reasonable job of baking biscuits, pies and tarts using the convection oven. I do very little microwave cooking, I use the microwave function mostly for thawing and reheating. The microwave function works well, it's the control of it that is of poor design.

Turbo defrost has to be set at a higher weight than actual if you want the product thawed. The overall controls are not logical, for example when adjusting the microwave power with the control knob, it goes from 1000watt to 800 then to 270 and back to 600watt. If you want it to work as a convection oven you have to push the convection button several times to get the required temperature, for example 14 times if you want to cook at 140C.

Convection oven temperature of 40C is great for proving bread, the trouble is that a loaf of bread cooked in the oven at a normal bread cooking temperature of 200C is overcooked (burnt) on the top and undercooked on the bottom.

The door must be first opened and closed before you can set the power and time and if you leave it set for more than five minutes it cancels your settings and you have to open and close the door and reset the power or temperature and time. That can be a real pain if you have several things on the go in the kitchen and you think I will just warm up what is in the microwave and you find you have to reset the power and cooking time, first opening and closing the door.

There is no temperature setting between 40C and 100C so it is useless as an oven to keep food warm, which should be a standard feature of a convection oven.

Sensor reheat is another useless function, it overdoes it and the food ends up losing too much moisture and is then often overcooked and dry. The fan is noisy and goes on for quite a while after using the microwave function, that appears to me to be unnecessary.

The oven basically works well forgetting the auto functions with the only thing I have not been able to bake in it is a loaf of bread which is a real disappointment as baking bread is one of the main reasons for having a convection oven and I have always been able to bake bread in my previous convection microwave ovens. The other big problems are illogical controls and having to open and close the door to set it or re-set it after five minutes and not being able to use it as a warming oven.

In my opinion I think the firmware microprocessor programming must have been done by a green high tech kid just out of university with no experience of a kitchen or cooking in the real world!

Panasonic have not been of any help after several phone calls, I finally spoke to a Australian representative who did not get back to me after initially speaking to him, even after me phoning and leaving a message for him to contact me three times, I have an excellent Panasonic answering machine on 24/7 if I am unavailable. I had to leave messages at the Panasonic help line call centre which is located in the Philippines, there is no phone number available to contact anyone at Panasonic in Australia. That applies to all Panasonic products.

I certainly regret buying this oven as I will have to live with it now, I would love to get rid of it and replace it with something better, unfortunately my budget does not allow such luxuries.