De'Longhi - Refurbished Excellent - Dinamica Plus Espresso Machine ECAM38085SB - Black

I purchased a refurbished unit from Beach Camera. Best Buy handled the sale, etc. PURCHASE & INITIAL STATE Going through Best Buy made the purchase straight forward. Beach was reasonably good about maintaining communication until FedEx picked up the unit. It took 4 days to get the unit. I have had it 7 days as of writing this. The unit was directly packed into the shipping box. There was no inner Delonghi branded box. The unit was packed well, though. All the accessories were included. As was a refurbished version of the main instructions. It's like having two posters, folded into quarters. Two sided. I am considering laminating them. If there was an initial QuickStart guide with a new unit, it was not included with the refurb. The unit was is excellent, though not perfect, shape. Thus far I could only spot a few very minor scuffs on some of the external edges. Gotta look closely to see them. The status counter noted that, prior to me, there were 12 coffee and 4 milk drinks brewed. Everything was taped up for stability in shipping. I will say that the tape was pretty hard to remove. Very adhesive and tacky. It was the type which has the built in "strings". A bit of overkill, if you ask me. Getting all of the residual adhesive off of the surfaces was the single biggest time sink. DRINKS I have brewed about 1/2 of the coffee drinks and 3 different milk drinks at this point. I am working through some very old (10-12 months from roast) beans and yet routinely get 1/4-1/3" crema. I bought some 2-week old beans but it will be 2-3 days before I get to them. Overall, considering the bean situation, I am quite pleased with the coffee results. I haven't done enough milk drinks yet to have a firm handle on them but the 3 I have brewed have been quite tasty for me, anyway. I am using distilled water, with some Third Wave Water minerals added. MENU / USAGE The menu is not junk or super hard to use, but it is un-intuitive for me. Unless you have taken the time to work out every drink in your profile, you're doing it "manually". I assume most will do that until they figure out the intensity and amount of fluid output they prefer. You have to generically select the "intensity" and "amount" first, then choose what drink it applies to. The user guide definitions of intensity unhelpful things like, "Light" and "Strong", etc. How light? How strong? Who knows. Try it and see what you like. I *think* it's tied to grind time but not sure. Then the output is described as, "Small", "Medium", "X-Large", etc. How many OZs or MLs are in a "Medium"? Unless you want to weigh it, again, who knows. And, of course, the output itself is different for an espresso vs. a coffee. To be fair, the manual does note upper and lower output bounds for each drink. So, I guess you'd know "X-Small" and "X-Large" but nothing else. MILK The carafe has been easy for me to use. No issues there. I will say, and I saw this in a YouTube video, for the flexible "straw" that goes vertically into the milk, there is a hole in the top end and that needs to be aligned so that milk can be drawn up and sent into the upper black housing effectively. MAINTENANCE Nothing major yet. I just soaked and washed the brew group at the 7 day usage mark. I do the automated rinse after each milk usage (which the machine reminds you to do). I have an issue just leaving milk in it, even in the refrigerator, when I have the original bottle, so I have been returning unused milk to that bottle. YMMV. OVERALL Is it worth $1000? The jury is still out regarding cost-to-value. It does do a very good job at being an automatic. I was willing to sacrifice that last 10% of excellence at the altar of consistency and convenience. Plus getting it through BestBuy allowed me to get about 3-400 USD off and 18 mos no interest. If this will hold up for 3-5 years, I'll consider it worth the cost.

I am deeply grateful for all the kind messages. I am deeply grateful for all the kind messages.