Gadgetory

hi I'm Katy Pilkington for CNET here with the review of the sharp r8 to 0j s one of the first things you may notice about this microwave is its coating it's got a silver coated metal outside I wish they would have just made it stainless it would have looked more durable and a little bit more elegant it's a 0.9 cubic foot interior and it has a 12 point 7 5 inch turntable the sharp is a 900 watt microwave which makes it the lowest powered microwave of any of the four we tested in this set the Panasonic claimed that it made really excellent omelets with its inverter technology and yet we found the Sharps to be the best they were fluffy evenly cooked and not overdone one of the things that were important for us to test when we set about assessing microwaves and their various performance capabilities were their presets and how accurately those worked the popcorn preset with the sharp was probably the most abysmal failure of all of his presets that we tested there were times that it only popped 40 kernels leaving vastly over 400 kernels unpopped it's a pretty disappointing bag of popcorn if you ask me but if you follow the popcorn manufacturers directions it popped a bag of popcorn that more resembled what we were expecting with between 69 and 80 unpopped kernels so again it's not a bad microwave it's just the preset doesn't really work very well this was true of frozen dinners and potatoes but basic core microwave functions aren't really what sharp is selling here they're selling their grill technology in their convection convection ovens use a fan to circulate that hot air throughout the inside of the oven rather than just letting it radiate and bounce off the walls and it works pretty well it comes with a grill rack that we use to grill burgers and chicken while it was better in terms of texture and overall juiciness the product wasn't so vastly superior to the other microwaves product that we felt that it was really worth the difference we defrosted chicken the defrost works about the same as a lot of other microwaves it's inconsistent it won't defrost all the way through most food items without beginning to cook thinner parts or the parts that are coming in contact directly with your cookware but we wanted to put the grill rack in the convection into the test again with all of that defrosted chicken and we put some chicken drumsticks on the grill pan and it made okay chicken in 17 minutes but for that amount of time you could make great chicken on your traditional grill outside so what's the lesson here my takeaway from this is that the Sharps presets are not necessarily optimum but that doesn't make it a badly performing microwave however for a price of 289 dollars you want a really well performing microwave but for our intents and purposes testing all of its functionality including those presets and sensors it just didn't hit the mark with this the little microwave that almost could the sharp are 8 to 0 Jas I'm Katie Pilkington 50 net you