I purchased an Oster model OM1201E0VG microwave a few months ago, after our existing microwave broke, then another model I ordered on-line arrived broken (the door had to pulled open with two hands and then wouldn't shut, lots of fun shipping *that* one back!), and then the first one of these I bought at a local Target was dropped during shipping and had one corner caved in, and at the time my life was very hectic so when I finally got one that worked by exchanging it at a Target in another city (each store only had one), I was willing to just live with it, because you have no idea how much you use a microwave until you go a week without one.
Anyway, here's what I imagine the R&D guys talked about when coming up with this model:
- "Let's give it a light inside, but let's not have the light turn on when the door is opened, but only work when the food is cooking and your view is almost completely obscured by the mesh in the window!"
- "Let's help our customers realize when they've opened the door by having the beeper beep when they open the door, you know, because they might not realize they were opening the door without that extra audio cue."
"Good idea! Let's also not allow any change in beepiness, as some other models allow via special control panel keypresses, and just in case some end user wants to make his home a little more serene by unhooking the beeper, let's use security bolts on the back of the unit so he can't open it." - "Even though this is a standard 1000-watt microwave oven, lets have it use so much power that it sends any computer UPS in the house into battery mode when anyone heats anything up."
- "Finally, let's give it a Timer function, but with a twist: after the timer is timing for a bit, let's have the countdown display stop displaying, so people never know how much time is left; and let's make the end-of-timer-time indicator noise be just one single beep!" "Good idea, there's got to be a market out there for people who don't really care when the timer go off!"
My inability to find this thing anywhere on the internet gives me pause. And the support website, as listed in the manual, is dead (http://www.osterliving.com/; WHOIS says the domain is registered, but has no site associated with it).
To be fair, there are a couple of good features:
- it has an actual handle, one of the things we looked for, because you can control the opening and closing much better (and do it more gently/quietly).
- if you heat something in it and forget to take it out, it will triple-beep at you to remind you after a minute or so.
But the negatives outweigh the positives. So much so that we've just replaced it with one of those barely-bigger-than-a-plate models that probably cost $40 new (we got it at a garage sale). It works much better.