A friend recommended a Phillips 5400 to me. I didn't need a lot of those features, so I scaled down a bit.

The Phillips 2200 makes good coffee. That's about as much as I need to say about that. I've been using pods for years, but now I am free.

The water reservoir is painfully small, and the waste bin fills quickly. An awful lot of water ends up in the waste tray. These two negatives are not a big deal. I suspect that even higher price machines have the same issues.

The packaging is very thorough, which was a bit annoying but also reassuring. Outside of beating on the box with a hammer, this machine should arrive in good condition.

4 stars. If the longevity claims are correct, I'll be buying a new coffee maker in about 18 years. If it really does last that long, the next one will be Phillips as well.

Now, that's where my original review ended. That was within a few days of originally receiving this machine. Since then, the machine has started making odd noises and behaving strangely. Last night I cleaned the brew group and troubleshot issues for a few hours. Nothing seemed to help; the machine was only making a few drops of coffee at a time.

I finally had the time to dig deeper today. On a Phillips support site, I finally found my answer. I thought there was no way it was such an easy fix, but I was wrong. My problem was the filter, and removing it instantly fixed my issue.

Don't fret! If something goes wrong, Phillips absolutely has a solution.

We had an Saeco Intellia for over about 12 years, which we loved, before it started being less reliable, throwing errors, wasting ground coffee, and just weaker coffee overall. I didn't want to spend another $800 or so on another superautomatic and decided to get this after watching/reading several reviews. It's only my wife and I who use this in the house. She prefers her morning double strength americano while I like a morning shot of espresso so we don't need a lot of the extra features of a more expensive superautomatic.

We've been using the Carina for a month now and I gotta say this machine is excellent for what it cost. The espressed coffee is way better than what the Intellia ever made.. stronger and more robust. The creme is about the same tho and still not nearly as much as I used to get with a manual espresso I had a long time ago (I think it was a cheap $80 delonghi but an excellent espresso maker nonetheless and WAY WAY WAY better than a Kureg or Nespresso which we've had before as well). The ground pucks are tighter too meaning there's more coffee grounds being packed in.

What I also love about the Carina is that if you run out of water during the brew, it will wait until you refill the reservoir and let you continue the brew instead of dumping the grounds and forcing you to start over again like the Intellia did. Other things I like about the Carinia.. The waste ground collection is within the waste liquid reservoir and the grounds fill up a bit faster than the liquid.. which means it kinda forces us to dump both the grounds and the liquid whenever the grounds collection is filled up. This prevents the liquid from overfilling and spilling out which used to happen quite a lot with the Intellia that had the ground collection separate from the liquid.

I am using the AquaClean filter for the moment to measure how effective it will be and the maintenance cost of replacing them every so often. We'll see if I want to keep using them or go back to the manual decalcification process.

Anyways.. the Carina makes great coffee and is a bit easier to clean. Highly recommend it.

Also, to anyone using a Kureg or Nespresso machines and looking to upgrade.. I strongly recommend getting a superautomatic.. they make a MUCH better cup of coffee and the Carina is probably the best one you'll find at this price range and not to mention you'll be saving money in the long run and create less waste for the landfill.

Have the unit for 2 months now and very happy with it.
No issue to report, it does take a few trial to find the good coffee with the good settings but I guess it is standard to any of these machine.
The self cleaning mode use a bit of water at each power on and off, but I guess it keeps the unit working fine on long shot.
The unit take some space (compare to a nespresso for example) but it surprisingly quiet when it comes to grinding beans!
Good coffee and saving tons of money on capsules

"We should get an espresso machine" said my wife. "I like espresso."

"Me too!" I replied. "Let's buy one!"

This seemed like an easy proposition. But down the rabbit hole I went, and I soon realized that I was on the verge of becoming a "coffee guy" - one of those people who has Very Strong Opinions about pressurized portafilters and very expensive and clever conical burr grinders. The kind of guy who speaks in hushed tones about steam pressure and cream and uses the word "extraction" a lot.

Since no one in my family want to spend every morning waiting an hour for me to tweak grind settings or calibrate the pre-infusion temperatures, and everyone agreed that I do not need another obsessive hobby, we started looking at automatic machines. We quickly decided that pod-based machines were right out for a variety of reasons, and similarly decided that one of those touch-screen possibly-self-aware machines were just going to be way way way out of our price range, we settled on the 1200. I checked reviews and videos and so forth, and we decided it was a good place to land.

We couldn't be happier.

Okay, okay, it probably doesn't make the absolute *best* espresso in the world. I'm sure somewhere, some geriatric italian barista is crossing himself and spitting every time I press a button on this thing. And it's loud. When it grinds, boy howdy you hear it grinding, and when it steams, you hear steaming and clunking and all manner of mechanical noises. I expected that, but it's still loud. The buttons lack a bit in terms of haptic feedback - until something actually happens I'm never entirely sure I've pressed one, so I always have that half second of "oh no, did I break it?" until i hear a pump spring to life. And it's big - this isn't a "stick it on the shelf and hide it away" kind of machine. It dwarfs my pressure cooker. And while the grinder does a fine job, you don't get access to it independently - you have only limited options for dosing (the 3-setting "aroma" control) or grind size (there's a knob inside the grinder itself) and the only time you see the grounds is in the "spent grounds" bin. I understand there's a way to fiddle with the temperature that involves opening panels and flipping switches; I have not tried it and I probably will not.

But those minor quibbles aside, it pulls a very respectable shot of espresso; I've already had a better flat white after a day of randomly poking at buttons than I have at my local mermaid-themed coffee shop, and even a straight shot of espresso was pleasant, well-flavored, and full-bodied. The milk steamer is acceptable - nothing to write home about, but it gets the job done and I've even managed to make some incredibly rudimentary latte art. It's easy to clean, and the AquaClean filter makes that part even nicer. Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty easy to use too - shove a cup underneath and press play and you're basically 80% of the way there. It's easy enough that everyone in my family can stumble into the kitchen and spit out a cuppa without thinking about it. It even makes plain coffee, which is great for the family members who just wants a cup of something hot and black and none of this continental nonsense. (I suspect the "coffee" is more akin to an americano, but I haven't been able to verify that.)

Time will tell if this thing holds up, but I have high hopes and good experience so far. It works better than the bargain espresso machines I see everywhere, seems to have a pretty good grind dialed in at the factory, and while it's a bit on the pricy side it's still a lot cheaper than the others in its category (and only marginally more expensive than a plain machine) and you don't need to buy a fancy grinder to go with it. And shipping was ludicrously fast.

Love the auto foam and espresso. Coming from a brevelle with a built in grinder and manual milk streamer. This Phillips saves me the extra effort from that machine so it gets used daily.

The only thing I don't like is that frothing milk alone is not intended with this machine. It has to be tricked by setting it to the preground coffee basket, picking cappuccino, then stopping the process when the frothing is done. The Froth amount is preset which is an annoying limitation if a lot is needed.

I would upgrade to the top of this line, but I can do what I use the most with this machine. No knocking pucks it manually, or cleaning the stream wand makes it worth it. I could use this to make other espresso drinks with a little more effort.