De’Longhi Magnifica Evo Computerized Espresso & Espresso Machine with Computerized Milk Frother for Latte, Cappuccino, Iced Espresso, Constructed-in Grinder, ECAM29084SB

I finally got my own!
I have used this automatic coffee machine many times at the house of my friend in Ireland, who has had it since 2017, and I always liked it a lot. So I looked at it when health benefits were claimed for drinking coffee in the morning. But pay $500 for a coffee machine? Are you crazy?? So I e-mailed my friend for advice. She wrote back in English:”It looks like my coffee machine. I’ll ask Jane Doe the number, she bought the same as mine, after tasting my coffee.”and in Dutch (we use both):”Hij is wat prijzig, dat doet pijn bij aanschaf, maar je hebt altijd heerlijke koffie! En de prijs vergeet je al na een maand.”which roughly translates to”It is a bit expensive, which hurts when you buy it, but you always have great coffee! And you will forget about the cost after a month or so.”So I ordered the machine, and I have not regretted it at all. It is so convenient to just press a button to get great coffee. My handyman loves it too; the first thing he does whenever he comes in is make a cup of coffee.One warning: read the manual! Do not try to wing it; you could damage the machine if you do it wrong. It is a complex machine. I am not at all surprised that there are relatively many one-star reviews. You may also take a hint from the length of this review. :)For example, while the machine is really intended for whole-bean coffee, when I first got it I wanted to finish off my remaining ground coffee. I had seen in the instructions that the machine provides a special duct for ground coffee (which presumably bypasses the burr grinder), and I threw the allowed maximum scoop of ground coffee in that duct. However, I had missed/forgotten that you need to *activate* (with the front top-left button) the machine before throwing the scoop in. As a result, the coffee fell right through the machine, to places where it should not be, and the machine refused to make coffee, saying it had no ground coffee to do so. Since the manual says the stray coffee might damage the machine, I had to carefully remove it all, with help of the provided long brush.Conversely, you may want to make sure that the machine is *de*activated when adding whole-bean coffee, because you would certainly not want whole beans to bypass the burr grinder and go on to the brewing process unground. Now the ground-coffee duct has a cover to prevent whole beans to enter, but any whole beans, or slivers of whole beans, that manage to get in anyway better fall through the machine than proceed to the brewing apparatus unground.Which reminds me, there is one very confusing thing all over the manual. The machine has a *power* on/off button at the rear, which is practically equivalent to plugging the machine in, or pulling the plug out again. The machine also has an *activation/deactivation* button at the front top-left which tells the powered-on machine to get ready for doing something, or to deactivate itself again. The manual refers to using either button as “turning the machine on/off” although they do completely different things. That is likely to cause problems.Indeed, apparently Jane, in trying to clean the “infuser” (see in the manual what that is), took the instruction of the manual to “turn the machine off” to be to “turn off the power switch” (or pull the plug). That was done, but without first deactivating the machine. Now there was a big problem: the infuser to be cleaned had disappeared! An extensive search was initiated by Jane and my friend, but the infuser could not be found *anywhere*. So a new infuser was ordered from DeLonghi, but when it was attempted to install it, the old infuser had reappeared?! This thing would not have happened if the manual had clearly said “de-activate the machine, then pull the plug” instead of “turn off the machine”.Another one from my friend, translated from the Dutch: “If you do not clean the infuser regularly, it can become stuck. That is scary, but once taken out of the machine, you can just clean it carefully.”Fortunately, the machine is not intuitive at all for guests who have not read the manual. At my friend in the past, if pressing the button did not produce my desired double espresso but instead a mystery display of lights, I just waited for my friend to fix it. I had no clue.But to be safe, if you have guests that are early risers, during the preceding evening you may want to make sure that the machine has enough coffee and water in it.To be sure, the coffee bean compartment holds about half a 12 oz pack of coffee beans, which lasts a reasonable time and may be OK.But the water compartment runs out very quickly. The machine is quite liberal in using water. And if the water runs out while brewing, you might get only half your cup of coffee. The water compartment is transparent, so you can see the level, and refilling water is trivial. (But there might be other issues. At my friend, the water of the kitchen sink is drinkable, but that of the bathroom sink is not. I tend to forget that. And at my own place, I throw “Zero-Water” filtered water in my machine, instead of tap water, to improve taste and prevent scale build up.)As another warning, as you can barely see in the picture, my machine is just below a kitchen cabinet. This makes refilling coffee awkward, scattering stray coffee beans all over the place. So to refill coffee, I pull the machine forward clear of the cabinet. (This also allows me to clean the area where the machine normally sits.) Something to keep in mind when selecting a location for the machine.Note in the picture that the stainless cup (to catch the waste water produced during activation and deactivation) and the black stone cup with stir sticks do not come with the machine, but I think they fit in well with its black and metal. The stainless cup and stir sticks come from Amazon, and the stone cup from a cheap department store.I changed a number of settings in the machine. First, I and my handyman felt that the coffee was not really that strong using the default settings. So I rotated the big knob on the front of the machine from the default vertical setting another 90 degrees towards the maximum (see pic). This should increase the amount of coffee the machine uses. I also increased the grinding fineness just a little bit (which must be done with the coffee grinder already running, so the first cup is not really representative of the result; taste the second cup). We like the results. (But watch it, if you make the blockage too big by using too much, too finely ground coffee, you will apparently clog the machine and the coffee will come out a drop at a time.)Next, I changed the amount of coffee produced by the double americano button to match the size of the cup I use for that. See the manual on how. (Apparently, if you press a button within three second after delivery, it adds more coffee. I must remember to tell my handyman that.)Also, the machine has a counter inside that periodically reminds you to descale the machine by running its automatic descaling routine. But I use Zero Water in my machine, which is essentially purified water that leaves no scale behind at all. So I reduced the frequency of the descaling cycle to the minimum the machine allows, and after over four months, I have not yet been prompted for a descaling. Somewhat of a relief, I hate wasting time and money; the DeLonghi descaler is about $4 a go. (But once in a half year or so would be OK, I guess, to waste $4 and whatever time.)Writing this review reminded me that I had never cleaned the infuser since I got the machine 4 months ago. And the manual says that it must be cleaned at least once a month! So I did it immediately. My friend does it as part of a complete cleaning job whenever the descaling light comes on. But since I changed that setting, I may need to do it more frequently than that.Coffee aficionada generally agree that you want to use water close to boiling for the best coffee. So I increased the brewing temperature to the maximum (minimum is apparently 190 F, maximum 205 F, boiling would be 212 F).But be careful here. I make my morning double espresso in a small carton cup as seen in the picture, and by the time the coffee is in the cup, after some cooling down while going through the spouts and while falling towards the cup, it is still at about 175 F according to my oven thermometer. That is worse than 165 F, which already produces *instant* burns. Now I am not that fond of poached tongue, if it is *my* tongue. And the carton cups are surprisingly insulating (for one, because their bottoms do not touch my cooling quartz countertop, and for another, because the coffee is so low in the cup that evaporation is really reduced). It takes about 5 minutes for the temperature to go down to 150 F, which becomes somewhat drinkable. No big deal for me, because I am cleaning up the breakfast stuff at the same time.But some guest may be unaware of how hot the coffee is. So I used my label printer to put “WARNING”, “coffee comes out too hot to drink” labels on the metal plate of the drip drawer, see picture.My handyman has no problems, as he throws lots of half and half in his double Americano. But it was somewhat of a pain for my own evening double Americano in a stainless insulated cup, even with a bit of Irish accent from the fridge added to the coffee. But on thinking this over while writing this review, I replaced the cup by a stone one. That is much better, the excess heat now goes quickly into the stone of the cup and the coffee is actually already becoming somewhat too cool for me near the end. I may put some cover over the cup to reduce evaporation while I am still drinking it, maybe just a paper towel.When you activate the machine, it blows some hot water through the machine to bring it up to temperature for brewing your coffee. If further unused, the machine will deactivate itself automatically after some time (while blowing some cleaning water through the system). I reduced that time to the minimum of 15 min, to force the machine to reheat itself before making the next cup.Apparently some people have the opposite problem as me: their coffee is too cool. I would bet that is because they brew the coffee into a big heavy stone cup or similar without warming the cup first. (Warming the cup can be done using the hot water or steam from the milk frother.) The “Get Started” guide talks about a “cup warmer shelf”, but I have no clue what that means. It seems to be the metal-covered plate on top of the machine; however this does not do any cup warming as far as I can see. Maybe the guide means the “*warmed cup* shelf” instead. Even so, I would not know how effective this “shelf” is in delaying the cool-down of any warmed cup. The metal would conduct heat away. Using a pot holder to put the cup on seems to make more sense to me.(To be sure, I think the translations of instructions from Italian into English are still better than those from Chinese into English that I have seen. Not unexpectedly.)Neither my handyman nor I use the “milk frother” that can be used to make cappuccino and such. I drink my coffee black, and my handyman just throws in a lot of half and half. But my friend loves cappuccino, so I asked her. She told me that she only uses the frother for hot water, as she will forget to perform the 6 step cleaning procedure of the frother immediately after each use with milk (which includes a minutes long wait for the frother to cool down after flowing hot water through it, among others). So she is afraid that the frother will become unhygienic.Seems reasonable to me. So, in case I get any guest who likes cappuccino or similar, I ordered a couple of battery-powered separate milk frothers from Amazon, one for $10 and another for $2.50 (cheap, but they do not last long). You can simply flush these frothers clean below the faucet. And a couple of cooks informed me that all you have to do for a cappuccino is warm the milk to 150 F in the microwave and then use such a milk frother on it. Seems like a much better idea to me.For those who really want to use the steam frother anyway, the instructions to take it apart were unclear to me. I eventually figured out that you are supposed to take the shiny metal part and rotate it a bit counter-clockwise (looking *from the top down*), after which you can pull it down.Gee, did I warn this would be a long review?

Está muy fácil de usar y un café de alta calidad

Excelente cafetera, muy fácil de usar y hace un café exquisito

J’aime beaucoup cette machine, d’utilisation facile, le café est bon même si elle est assez bruyante.Je déplore par contre la petite qualité du support de tasse chromé qui est déjà complètement rayé alors que je l’ai achetée depuis moins d’un mois.