Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Yes, the build quality is good, and yes, it does the job well. There's something you should know before buying it, though. I wish I had known. Other reviewers have been very charitable in describing the controls as "not intuitive". For the sake of forewarning future buyers, I'll be blunt: The user interface is a steaming pile of... um... garbage. You get a three-digit display and two buttons that each serve multiple functions. That design decision alone was foolishly stingy, as others have noted. A knob and another digit (for displaying short words) would have done wonders, and I would gladly have paid the extra $3 in hardware costs. Especially since these controls are required for even the simplest of operations, like setting the temperature. The two buttons you get are labeled: UP and ENTER, but those labels are misleading, because neither matches the corresponding button's function in the device's normal operating state. If you find your way into the settings menu (which you cannot do with the buttons alone) the four top-level categories are represented by mysterious, disjointed numbers: 01, 03, 11, 14. Even if you're a programmer who habitually translates decimal numbers to binary, this menu is still meaningless. It's all the more insulting to discover that letters *can* be displayed, as they are in the submenus; just not here, the menu where they are arguably needed most. Want to raise the temperature while you're working? Pressing the UP button won't do it. You must hold the ENTER button for a while, then wait, then repeatedly press the UP button until the first digit of your target temperature appears (and then nine more times if you overshoot), then press ENTER, and then do it again for each additional digit, until the display shows your target temperature and you press ENTER a final time. It's like having to program a 1970s/1980s videocassette recorder... just to adjust the temperature of your soldering iron. Okay, that madness is not the end of the world, but adding injury to insult, can you guess what happens if you accidentally (and understandably) hold the UP button instead of ENTER to adjust the temp? It takes you through the same procedure, making it look at first like you succeeded, and then reverts to displaying the original temperature. Want to know why it didn't work? That was the procedure to recalibrate the machine's temperature control. Congratulations: Now every temperature the machine displays is wrong, and will remain wrong even after a power cycle, because the machine tricked you. Oh, and it doesn't tell what happened, so it's very possible that you're now soldering at a much higher temperature than you think. I hope you didn't damage any components. What if you somehow figure out what happened and you want to fix it? Too bad. The manual doesn't tell you how. It doesn't even mention that it can be done. You'll have to wait until you can reach Hakko support, or else find a note online from some other unfortunate soul who was also burned by this unforgivably awful excuse for an interface. I hope it happened during business hours and you have a phone nearby, or you're someplace that has internet connectivity. For the record, here is the secret factory reset procedure: 1. Turn off the power switch. 2. Hold the UP and ENTER buttons. 3. Turn on the power switch with those buttons still held. 4. Wait until the display says "A". 5. Release the buttons. 6. press UP to make the display say "U". 7. Press ENTER. I hope that saves someone some trouble. Dear Hakko, Please do better in the future.