Panasonic NN-CS894SEPG

This oven is the replacement for an exploded 16 year old Whirlpool combination oven. I have been using the oven for 3 months before writing this review. What I was looking for was a microwave with an oven function, with a large interior space. The steam function is nice but not essential in my opinion. Important considerations for purchasing this oven were: - Limited outside depth due to the available space. - Preheat quickly. - Easy to keep clean. - Oven temperature adjustable per 10 degrees. - A little hefty microwave power. This oven scores well on all these points. It is much shallower than any of its ilk. Its interior space is much wider than all the alternatives. Even large oven dishes fit effortlessly. The oven can be set per 10 degrees, preheats in a few minutes and, a big advantage, warns once that it is hot. And not every minute, like its predecessor. (Something that's terribly annoying if you're just not done preparing your dish :-) It works without a turntable and that does not affect the functioning of the microwave in any way as far as I can judge. Heating in the microwave is excellent, certainly no worse distributed or slower than in my previous oven with a turntable. Due to the lack of the turntable, support wheels and a drive, the oven is also relatively easy to keep clean. I used the steam function once, for chicory, and it worked well. Time-consuming and a lot of hassle with filling the water tank several times and emptying the collection container. Because you can steam a maximum of 300 grams of vegetables at a time. A (small) family of 3 people, 200 gr. vegetables per person = steam at least 2x. But: it does work. And as said, steaming was not an argument for me to buy this oven. The oven also has disadvantages: The time setting with the touch slider. I had my reservations about this beforehand and indeed, in practice it is a clumsy feature. I understand that a rotary knob doesn't fit in the design, but that would really be a lot more convenient. Not a show stopper. A special thing that I didn't think about for a second is that a fresh pizza does not fit in it. The oven is too shallow. That means cutting a bar off that pizza and that's sub-optimal to say the least. I mean, I don't want to have to think about that when I'm craving convenience foods like pizza. Home late. No time and no desire to cook properly. Then that pizza just has to fit. A bit of a show stopper. But the feature with which this oven has lost the 'Recommended' designation for me is the uneven heating in the oven setting. Every oven dish (Chicory with ham and cheese, Bobotie, Pasta from the oven, whatever) is invariably burnt to a greater or lesser extent on the back and light to normal colored on the front. You're forced to turn your dish during the baking process, a tedious job in a sweltering eye-level oven. You might take that for granted in a convection oven of a few tens, but I find that incomprehensible in this not-so-cheap Panasonic Combi. I also read about the same problem in other reviews, so it will not be an example. It can't be that hard to get the heat distribution right, even if there's no turntable in the oven. In short, this oven is a great looking, solid appliance, with an excellent microwave combined with a poorly performing convection oven. And that makes it not recommended.