It's a video about a microwave!

This reminds me of the stove my parents had back in the early 70s. It was a Sears Kenmore gas stove, but the front right burner had a sensor that was spring loaded so it would press against the bottom of the pan. The control dial had a temperature setting and that burner would automatically raise and lower the flame to keep the pan the temperature you picked. We called it "The burner with the brain" and still talk about it, but no stove I've used since has this. It was just fantastic for keeping steady temperatures for things like deep frying, making pancakes, etc. I still miss it.

Now I want a microwave with UV lights that will make my Mushrooms generate vitamin D for me

Kirsa

Now I want that done melody as my phone's notification sound!

Papin Faizal

Fred Kinley should definitely be your pseudonym from now on. 🤣 Those Sharp microwaves are amazing. We had a slightly more user friendly but decidedly less fun version of one of their sensor microwaves in the early aughts and it was amazeballs.

The one truly not-no-effort thing about this video was the number of times I set the damn clock

Technology Connections

Regarding problem 1, I never really used this at all as a child, so it's not like I was taught how to use it. It's very straightforward, and you'll see more of that in the follow-up. 2. OK, so no bag of popcorn will have no unpopped kernels. I don't know if this is right to say or not but I think some kernels are just "duds" and don't pop. I didn't intend to imply that it pops every kernel, rather that it gets right to the sweet spot and stops. As to how it does that - well again, it's all down to being able to determine the size of the bag based upon when it detects steam. The same amount of energy is going in regardless of the size, so larger bags take longer to burst. The same logic applies to any food - a bigger potato won't produce steam until later into the cooking cycle.

Technology Connections

Thanks for this insight!

Technology Connections

Did you set the date based on when you planned to upload to Youtube? Great vid by the way and Nov 12 is my birthday! :)

Sadly the trend for "online enabled", which are really "online dependent" isn't going to slow. These days there's absolutely no incentive for companies to build something like this microwave when they can instead offload the building of the database to after the sale, have the potential of making the consumer dependent on their online services. It's like the problem plaguing software, why build something self-contained and right out of the box when you can have some combination of incomplete at the point of sale and dependent on your services for continued functionality.

Alan B.

3:35 it seems to link to videos.support.samsung.com, which forwards to the Samsung Care youtube channel.

nobody

Nice microwave. But I prefer minimalist microwaves with only two wheels: one for power, and one for a timer. No display needed at all, and literally timeless.

Do you find that a dial saves you time? or is it just a comfort thing? I would think a number pad would be faster and easier to use. Especially if you are wearing gloves.

Lucas Bennetts

Have 60 seconds on the counter to say your NEN is still quality production and I could not guess it was NEN unless you said so. And its November too. Oh, there's the bell, food done. =]

Joe Kudrna

For anyone that prefers plain popcorn, I use a silicone popcorn maker in the microwave. It takes a scoop of kernels, doesn't need oil and have yet to get burnt popcorn after 2 years of use. I usually wait until there are 10 seconds between pops (which would burn bagged popcorn) and usually leaves around 5-10 unpopped kernels. Here in Ireland, standalone microwaves are the most common. Ours is a a standalone Delonghi combination, i.e. microwave, grill and fan oven. We use the fan oven mode regularly. The microwave part is no more sophisticated than most basic microwaves (no sensor), although it can microwave and grill/bake simultaneously. The main feature we do like is simplicity - Just a knob and 3 buttons (select, start and stop).

Seán Byrne

4:20 nice

riyadh

I wish microwave ovens would spin the turn table back to a "home" position every time. That way, you can reheat a mug of coffee and not have to go search for the handle once the cooking is done.

Howie Walters

Memories of Mom's old Sharp Carousel with an Easy Rehat button. I remember you'd push Easy Reheat and then a number, for some reason we used 1 and 5 only :P I have a Frigidaire over the stove one that is kinda meh. It has buttons for things on the front I Never use. I do like that 1-6 just automatically set the time for that many minutes on high.

Jason Wellband

I've figured you out...you find the best overlooked stuff, you hoard it all from ebay and offerup, then make a video about how great it is, then resell it all to us with bot accounts! lol

Came here to comment the same thing. lol

Garrett Rabenold

Another great video. Thank you so much! Even your low effort vids are awesome to watch. Can hardly wait for the next! ✌

Lorraine Hughes

One of my favorite tricks with the Velos is that one could change the power setting or time remaining *without* interrupting cooking. I loved being able to tweak the power level on the fly to achieve a nice low simmer for cooking rice or pasta. Try doing that on a non-inverter microwave; you'll alternate between no simmering whatsoever and ZOMG boiling over.

Matt Whitlock

That wasn't the best microwave oven ever made. That distinction belongs to the Whirlpool Velos over-the-range microwave. It features a bright, backlit, dot-matrix, monochrome LCD display that is touch sensitive (capacitive, though not multi-touch). It has deep, cascading menus of food choices that call up automated programs. It has infrared heating elements for crisping that can operate simultaneously with the magnetron, and the magnetron itself is powered through an inverter. You vastly underestimate the value of an inverter microwave.

Matt Whitlock

it even has Ratatouille Puppet inside, sick, just sick man

Galen Thurber

take my money!

Galen Thurber

spot the qrcode for extras points

Galen Thurber

I peaked in 97 - sad face

Galen Thurber

I remember seeing these at the time, it felt like a vision of the future. My microwave still has knobs on it and goes ping. It's a nice ping but it isn't smart.

Matt Tester

There are two things I remain unconvinced of (not as in "I think they are false", just "insufficient evidence they are true"): 1. That this is actually easy to use - I ignore most features on a regular microwave because they are too much bother to fiddle with; why should a more advanced and elaborate set of features be easier? For example, the idea of reading recipes off a tiny dot-matrix display attached to a large metal box does not appeal to me at all. You learned how to work this thing from your grandma, rather than having to rely on its interface to be actually learnable. So your experience of how intuitive it is is probably quite atypical (consider information like "the popcorn and potato settings work particularly well, try those!") 2. That a one-sensor system of pre-programmed cooking heuristics is that much better than a zero-sensor system of pre-programmed cooking heuristics - using the popcorn example, I've definitely made microwave popcorn that is both burnt and partially-unpopped. That seems to imply that there have to be at least a couple of variables one would need to tweak to avoid both problems. But the microwave apparently just picks some time-to-done based on time-to-steam?..

Wait a sec. You can't say "if there are any special instructions, they're right there waiting for you" and then *completely skip over the "Play-Dough" preset*. We need a demo. :)

I think the peak for time entry on microwaves was the knob: twist to set seconds; press in and twist to set minutes. You could set any length of time you want in just a second or two!

Monte Greene

I just wish that my Panasonic Inverter microwave had those features; I'd then consider it the "Ultimate" in design! I love my Panasonic because I can ACCURATELY control the power level to handle jobs small and large, and adjust the heat time to the type of food. (My wife does not like it because you pretty much HAVE to adjust the power level. Its 1300 Watt output far exceeds the wimpy things everyone else sells and that she is used to using.)

HarveyB

Yep, that's very much the norm here. I think combo microwave / conventional ovens were something of a fad for a time, but have mostly fallen out of favor.

Technology Connections

Yes, that's when I'll be releasing it publicly.

Technology Connections

The way Sharp achieved this in 1994 was due to Lionel Tarassenko's use of neural networks to process sensor data. He later developed jet engine health monitoring and medical products but I remember his stories of having to cook hundreds of microwave meals to produce the training data for the Sharp neural network.

Steven Clarke

Do people in the US still buy microwave ovens that don't do conventional oven functions too? (force air heat etc) The only ones I see for sale here are the 20 to 30 euro ones at the DIY shops. The electronics shops don't even have them I think... I love my (by now) pretty old microwave oven (with force air heat). The brand stopped selling any type of microwave here years ago and all the other brands don't offer what I want. (Display on top so extra large items fit)

Buzzin

Only the wattage has raised, from like 600 to 800

Braxen

Alec, I couldn’t help noticing the date on the display. Did you originally intend for the vid to be released on the 12th?

Andre van Soest

Love the video. But I'm not convinced that microwave popped all of the popcorn kernels (or close). Maybe you could do another demo on your 2nd channel.

Professor Kroog

I've seen claims that some microwaves do this, but using steam seems like the better deal to me. For one, every bag pops differently. There are plenty of 2 second silences that occur well before it's done popping. Using the point at which the bag bursts to estimate bag size would average all that noise out.

Technology Connections

How about a microwave popcorn sensor that listens to the kernels popping and stops cooking when the rate of popping decreases to about a second between pops? That's what the package tells you to do with your own ears anyway.

Mark Hesse

I like that the date on the microwave is set to the video release date. :P

Jason Hughes

One advancement that I like is that some upscale microwave ovens have a convection oven built-in. As for UI, I'm a huge fan of ovens with knobs instead of a number pad to select cooking modes and times.

nobody

I never thought i'd live in the era of "Peak Microwave"

I'm still using the microwave that I bought in 1995, which is also a Sharp, although a lot less smart than yours.

Michael Dunn

I need to stop watching your videos on stuff like this, cause all it does is make me go "OH MY GOD THATS AWESOME I WANT IT", lol. Thank you for the great Video.

Honorary Octopus

If I remember correctly, its because of the way the AC motor for the tray works. It can spin either way depending on where the AC sine wave is when it gets powered on. I'm sure someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

David LeBlanc

🤣 The laugh I needed now 😁 Thank you! Which reminds me... The last time I used a microwave (for food then, not to heat the agar in the lab) was... uhm... more than 12 years ago? Such a simple thing with just 2 dials: one for the duty-cycle, one for the (mechanical) timer, with a real mechanical bell at the end 😉. Yes, it was white, but without the "rounded" figures, just a plain box 😜

MrHammond

You're giving me Juicero flashbacks with the whole "scan a barcode and consult a cloud database on how to cook it" concept... food DRM here we come.

Emily Elam

Looking forward to this. Hopefully we solve the mystery of why the tray spins backwards sometimes