Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This unit is replacing a 10(ish)-year old Hamilton Beach food processor that I had a love/hate relationship with. Finally, enough parts wore out on it that I could justify buying a new one (even though, realistically, it was still working). I wasn't stuck on the Hamilton Beach name, but this happened to fit my needs and my wallet. I can't say the unit feels particularly high quality. In fact, when I first took it out of the box, my initial thoughts were that they somehow forgot to put a motor in it. The base of my old one weighed like 5 lbs and this entire setup is a fraction of that. That is likely the reason the quality feels lacking. The switch in particular feels only ok, but for $50, I don't really have room to complain. Strangely enough, I rarely use it for food. Instead, we use it to grind up soft dog treats into powder to sprinkle over dry dog food to make it more enticing. Enticing, to the dogs, not to us. It tackles this chore with ease. I've used it for making hummus and slicing up onions, and it handled both of those jobs like a true champ. The stated capacity is 10 cups, but as is the case with almost all food processors, that is only for dry goods. The liquid capacity is 2 cups, if you go by the line marked on the bowl. I filled the bowl up with water until it was spilling out of the hole in the middle, and it held 6 cups. So figure it'll easily do 4 liquid cups without spilling down the center shaft, since liquids are thrown outward when the blades are spinning. However, the top is not hermetically sealed to the bowl, so some liquids might dribble out down the sides on high speed if you push past the rated liquid capacity. Honestly, I don't know how so much power and speed comes from such a lightweight device. The motor noise is not horrendous, but I've only had one other food processor to compare it to. It is probably a little quieter than the old one, which is not to say that it is silent. The noise is more of a high speed whirring sound than the throaty growl of the one I retired. It's almost a hollow sound, which again, does not instill a lot of confidence in the quality. Perhaps I'm just partial to heavy tools. Performance-wise, I can't think of anything negative to say. The base even has suction cup feet on the bottom to keep it from jumping around the counter. The food scraper is a gimmick, right? I had already made up my mind to never use such an obviously far-reaching add-on before ever taking it out of the box. Then I tried it once. Honestly, I don't think it has been separated since. It doesn't scrape down below the height of the blades, but it does clean all that loose stuff off the sides fairly well. The scraper is just made of plastic, but it is well-designed and effective. I now have to wonder why this feature took so long to evolve. :) UPDATE: Over 2 years later and still going strong. We don't chop as many dog treats with it as we used to. The dogs are old and we have resorted to giving them grilled chicken breast, which we can only chop in small batches or it goes bad. So we use a small chopper. But I have absolutely no complaints about the performance or effectiveness of this product to date.