Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Has great features and does an excellent job of cooking and reheating. The sensor function is quite accurate. It's really hard not to love your new Panasonic microwave oven. Try. Don't get attached to the thing, because it's engineered to fail. The failure is not in the control circuits or the magnetron or the other expensive bits. No, it's in the cheap, simple part. The door latch is no damn good. The bracket that holds the microswitches is made of thin material that fails with time. (The microswitches are interlocks that are supposed to prevent operation of the oven unless the door is properly latched. An admirable goal, that.) If you're lucky and use the microwave oven a lot, it will fail within the warranty period. If you're smarter than i was (not difficult to achieve) you'll pat the $14 for the Square Trade warranty offered when you register your microwave oven with Panasonic. That will put put your eventual failure in the sweet spot between the end of the one-year Panasonic warranty and the almost-assured failure before two years have elapsed. HERE'S WHAT TO WATCH FOR: Maybe after a few months you'll notice that the door can be moved up and down a little when it's closed. At some point you'll close the door, select your cooking protocol and push the START button. Maybe nothing will happen when you start the oven. Maybe the counter will start but the oven won't actually operate, then it will shut down. After awhile you'll find that SLAMMING the door makes it work. That's just a temporary workaround. It won't be long before nothing you do will make it work. The bracket and/or the sheet metal to which the bracket is attached are thin and inadequate and WILL fail. According to my spectrum analyzer, the microwave oven leaks rather a lot of microwave energy during the period the door doesn't latch properly. Fortunately, the oven will probably stop operating before too much tissue damage occurs. I am not an oncologists, so I don't know what the medical implications of a partially latched microwave oven might be or how much genetic damage might result. You really have to admire the advanced metallurgy and materials engineering that results in failure of the cheapest parts to render the microwave oven completely useless the day after the warranty expires. I suppose the junkyards are a rich source of working magnetrons and working inverter boards from dead Panasonic microwave ovens, most rendered useless by 11 cents ( a guess) in substandard parts. Thanks "value engineers". Thanks MBAs. UPDATE: Late 2014 There is not a Panasonic service center in the San Francisco bay area, and shipping microwave ovens around just doesn't make sense. However, there is a Panasonic authorized service company in Sunnyvale. The quoted price to repair the oven was $65, about half what we paid for the oven. Rather than engage in another festive round of buy-and-discard, we drove the Panasonic microwave oven 18 miles and left it for repair. A few days later we picked it up, brought it home, and tried it out. No improvement at all; the door closed (or more correctly, didn't close) exactly as it had the week earlier. The oven did not work as the interlock switches (or whatever the problem was) had not been repaired. So we took it back. This time, the repair was completed properly. Apparently this oven CAN be fixed if anybody cares. We did the second time what we should have done the first time: we made them put a glass of water in the oven and prove that the repair was done. It is now the end of June 2015 and the thing still works. The door closes with a gentle push. With luck, we might get another year or two out of it. The expensive bits (the power supply, the inverter, the magnetron, the control panel) seem to have much longer lifespans than the door latch and interlock. Weird.