Bottom line the best machine imaginable if you are ok replacing it reliability and good customer service is not a concern to you. MaurigoMy Gaggia machine works perfectly now,but it wasn't easy to get good one.I had to replace 3 brand new machines because they were broken out of box.I had great support from amazon staff but Gaggia tech support(IMPORTIKA) WAS USELESS AND NOT FRIENDLY AT ALL.
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I agree. Nice looking machine with great tasting espresso but questionable durability. The worst part is that once you send it to New York, Importika the distributor/importer is unresponsive and unreliable. My machine arrived at Importika for service on March 23rd and I am still waiting for an ETA. Gaggia has always stood for the highest quality. I am afraid that this awesome machine may fail in the last mile: durability and service from its importer.Read Best Reviews of Gaggia 90800 Platinum Vogue Automatic Espresso Machine, Silver Here
We've had this Gaggia for almost three years now (updated from our original review -still very happy with it). We use it every day to make probably 10 cups a day. This is one VERY nice machine and it has been completely dependable. Excellent espresso and coffee, and of course it pays for itself compared to buying by the cup. It has a fairly quiet grinder, and if you want to make coffee while kids are sleeping just put your hand over the single-dose hopper and the sound level drops by about 80%, making it really quiet. It takes about a minute to heat up from standby mode. After that, it produces espresso in 50 sec., regular coffee in 90 sec. We bought the milk island and it works, but isn't worth the effort: Cleaning it is a major hassle, and it's easier and faster just to foam the milk manually with the steam spout, which you can rinse off in a few seconds while the coffee is brewing. The steam spout has a sleeve so it isn't too hot to touch.There is a much more expensive version of this machine that has more electronics -save your money and get this one. The coffee produced is exactly the same.
The Gaggia is incredibly versatile. You can use the presets, you can adjust the presents to suit you, you can program the machine to brew just the way you want for each type of coffee using "learning" mode, or you can just press the start button again to stop the brewing. You can adjust the amount of coffee. You can bypass the grinder and use single doses of ground coffee -for example to make a cup of decaf. You can make hot water for tea or steam for cappuccino using the steam/hot water spout.
The tank has a water filter that is optional to use and the machine has a descaling cycle that we don't need because we use only distilled water, which I highly recommend. (If you can afford this Gaggia, you can afford a distiller too!) It also has an automatic cleaning cycle for everything but the brew group, which itself is very easy to clean by rinsing it off.
The four minor but irritating downsides: (1) A stupid design flaw for such an expensive machine is that the "fill the water tank" message is useless. It OUGHT to display the message when there's not enough water to make the type of coffee you select. Instead, if there's not enough water, the machine doesn't warn you. It will go ahead and start the brewing, abort it in mid-cycle when the water runs out, and THEN display the message (which might as well say "you should have filled the water tank"). The result is wasted time and coffee beans. To prevent this from happening, each time before you make coffee, you have to pull the water container to see whether there is enough water. There's not even a visual water-level indicator. This got to be so annoying that I made my own water-level indicator by drilling a hole through the plastic exterior and into the bottom of the tank, inserting a transparent tube and silicone-gluing it in, and inserting the top (open) end of the tube into another drilled hole in the plastic just above the top of the tank. I marked low and high water levels. Problem solved! See photo. With that one irritating problem solved, the machine is just about perfect. The other downsides listed below are minor by comparison.
(2) There is no optional water-feed option similar to a refrigerator icemaker water line connection. The tank has to be refilled a LOT, in part because the coffee is so good that you tend to drink a lot of it. When I was solving problem #1, I added another plastic tube that runs from our water distiller, so that we can manually fill the tank when our homemade water-level indicator shows that the level is low. The photo shows that too.
(3) The single-dose unit is very picky; use just a tad more than the standard amount of coffee and it will reject the whole thing, abort the brewing, and dump the wet but unused ground coffee in the dump bin.
(3) Even if you use only distilled water, this machine insists on descaling its boiler every month or so, even when the water-hardness scale is set to minimum. There is no "0" or "distilled water" setting. So you have to let it run the descaling cycle, which takes about 10 min. and half a gallon of water, and it's happy.
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have used many super automatic machines and this makes by far the best espresso that I have ever had. The espresso comes out nice and slow and is dark and rich. The milk island makes a very creamy froth and is easy to clean but I normally use the steam wand, which also works great. The grinder is very quiet so I can use it and not wake up my wife (I get up early). I very highly recommend this beautiful machine!!!!!
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