A toaster is a staple kitchen appliance. For $20, you can buy a simple device to toast bread, English muffins, or bagels. Whether you prefer your breakfast lightly toasted or nearly burnt, toasting bread to the perfect degree often takes some trial and error. Sometimes that means finding out your toast is starting to burn on the edges and it’s time to press cancel before your meal is ruined completely. But once you find the perfect setting, when you switch to a different type of food — from toast to bagels, for example — you have to adjust the settings from the beginning.
The
How does the Revolution InstaGLO R180 Toaster work?
The first thing you’ll probably notice when you use this toaster is that there’s no lever or any button on this device. It’s all done through the touch screen. You select what you’d like to toast — whether it’s bread, a bagel, or a Pop-Tart — and to what degree you want it to be toasted. Once you press start, the toaster will automatically lower your bread into the device and the screen will display how far along the bread is in the toasting process.
To initiate the process, you first choose between five choices of food you’d like to toast: a bagel, waffle, pastry, English muffin, or just regular bread. Then you select between three options: fresh, frozen, or reheat. And finally, you choose between seven different toasting degrees, and the touchscreen shows you an image of what each one looks like, from lightly toasted to almost burnt.
The toaster reaches full heat within two seconds, making the toasting process much quicker than usual. While you can expect your bread to be toasted faster, I found it was still easy to burn the bread. The smart sensors — an advertised feature of this toaster — did not prevent the bread from burning, and there wasn’t a “smart” way to stop the toasting process once the bread was already burning. I smelled that the bread was burnt and pressed cancel. It also doesn’t necessarily toast bread evenly. I tried toasting a smaller bagel and found that one side was more heavily toasted than the other.
Credit: Revolution Cooking
Will the Revolution InstaGLO R180 Toaster fit in your kitchen?
The other thing you’ll likely notice after setting this device on your kitchen counter is that this toaster is larger than most two-slice toasters. The appliance measures 8.4 x 11.6 x 6.1 inches. Compare that with a basic two-slice $30 toaster from
One interesting accessory is the
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Whether or not the
The main feature of this smart toaster is that it can toast bread to various degrees and can toast many different types of bread and pastries consistently. It also does all this more quickly than an average toaster. But it falls short in providing enough “smart” features to justify the cost.
A
Overall, it’s hard to justify spending $350 on a toaster when you can buy a device that does practically the same thing for a tenth of the cost, only without the touchscreen.