Chef@Home Oven
Hugely disappointing
08/11/2022 11:43
Having experience of computer vision, I know how hard it is to get right, so I was very interested to see how the oven fared in this regard. Couple that with AI, and it’s a bit of a tall order in my opinion, but I was ready to be impressed. Unfortunately, the oven failed to live up to the hype and in the process overlooked the basics.
Pros:
- It cooks food reasonably well.
- The soft close mechanism is nice.
- I liked the pull-out rack.
- Big touchscreen.
Cons:
- The power button seems a bit plasticky.
- The oven takes over a minute and half to boot up.
- The oven is very slow to warm up, taking over 20 minutes to get to 200C.
- The chime to tell you that pre-heating is complete is very quiet so you often miss it.
- The software is buggy. I spent over 8 hours trying to get it online! The camera sometimes fails to show an image. On several occasions, an “Error 01” message would be displayed, requiring a power cycle at the isolation switch.
- The processor is hugely underpowered making the UI laggy and slow to respond, so setting up a program can be fiddly.
- The UI is full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors and it looks like the translations were done online. We enjoyed our “Frozen Thin Potatoes", they were just like chips!
- The camera image quality is poor. It is over-exposed with limited contrast, and there are significant shadows inside the oven. It is nearly impossible to tell from the screen or the phone app whether the food is cooked, so we have to open the oven to look. The webcam view on the phone app often shows an image from the previous day.
- When I tried the “Preci Test” function, it correctly identified my chips (as “frozen thin potatoes”), but it got everything else wrong. Other times it failed to confirm the cavity was empty so I couldn't proceed. In all cases it was quicker and easier to just set it myself.
- The “Preci Probe” function is quite easy to set up, but when we tried it, it stopped the cooking program well short of the target temperature. We set 70C, but it turned the oven off at 40C!
- The integration with the hOn app is poor. The app often shows the oven as offline when it isn't. Notifications arrive at random times both during and after the cooking session or not at all, and can be completely blank or with placeholder text.
Once the oven goes to sleep there is no way to wake it. Tapping on the screen or waving your hand in front of the sensor does nothing, forcing you to cycle the power.
oldgit
Worcester , Spojené království
Age: 52
Gender: Female