Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've used a couple of generations of the Foodsaver and have found them easy to use, efficient and cost effective. We bought this one yesterday from a local retail store and it is going back today. It's a classic case of a company "improving" a product that worked perfectly well and really making a mess of the new design. I can't believe that anybody at the company actually used this thing and thought it was an improvement. The biggest problem is the automatic bag sensor. The machine won't run (seal or vacuum) unless the automatic bag sensor tells the machine there is a bag in place. This "switch" is placed inside the machine, so to make your own bag, you have to push the bag in the seal slot about 1 1/2 inches. Of course this creates at least 1 inch of waste on each end of every bag. The other problem with this is that you have "push" a plastic bag into a narrow slot. Often the bag sensor does not pick up on the bag and you have to push and push to get the thing to turn on. Pushing a flexible bag is very frustrating and after about 1/2 hour of fighting with trying to get it to seal the first open end of the bag, I was ready to take an axe to the thing. It's just a very poor design. The older style, clamshell design was much better. You opened the machine, positioned the bag end right where it needed to be, shut the machine and it kicked right on. It was easy and obvious and worked every time. Skip this one, look for the simpler one (Food Saver V2840 for example), it's less expensive and works better.