Great size for the price. Doesn't pull vac as hard as my older machine.

Adjustable temperature and cooling to handle plastic or mylar, speed/vacuum is adjustable. Package did not include the amount of hydraulic oil it should have. Manufacturer 1st day shipped me an additional bottle at no cost and told me I could substitute a commonly available alternative cheaper in bulk.

Expensive, but worth every penny so far.

Quick answer: Buy it now. I bought at least 5 foodsavers over the years and so I could have bought one of these and saved money and frustration. Foodsaver is a fine product for what it is, cheap solution to do better than a ziploc. First consider that this can do all the foods a foodsaver can, several things it can't and also can do it much much better. I've yet to taste something frozen in this to have that freezer taste where it happened all the time in the foodsaver. 1/3 to 1/5 of foodsaver seals are immediately flawed and have to be redone. After freezing you will find another 1/5 to 1/10 of the bags to lose seal with a foodsaver. With this, that becomes 0. I literally have only had 1 bag mess up and I was trying to make it fail by being so sloppy until it failed...100% my fault. Other than that one, 100% success.

Everyone looks at the price point and cringe. I did too. Hindsight is 20/20, I was wrong. You want to calculate the frustration rate of sealing problems, the slowness of it, the loss of product that didn't freeze properly, etc. Once you do that there is no contest, this machine does what you need and is a pure pleasure to use. It is overkill for most home use because you won't hit it with enough to challenge it. Even in Alaska I figure it can keep up with 4 people doing meat processing and 1 bag person. It is big and heavy so you probably won't be moving this around a lot. I bought a stainless table with wheels just in case I want to move it but it stays in one place. Just plan around it.

Some processing makes this absolutely necessary though. If you want to do liquids, you need it. If you plan to process any bulk foods, wild game & fish then you need it. I have not compared it to other chamber vacuum sealers to compare but I can say it has never failed, everyone that ever sees it says it is amazing. Just realize the upfront cost seems much worse than it really is. A good foodsaver is like $200, this unit was $1350 I think. Is it worth 6x as much? Absolutely. Math will tell you that you need to process 1000 bags to recoup the upfront cost but I say it is much lower, like 200 bags. Why? Because your time is money. Satisfaction is money. Foodsaver is a lot of frustration that isn't as obvious as just price alone for the bags (which is a big difference). The biggest thing is quality of the seal, longevity of the storage because of the seal and user satisfaction.

With most products, if it does what it states in the description, I am happy. This Vacmaster VP230 performed as described and better. Using cheap 3 mil 10"x13" bags at $.05 each in less than a minute the machine removed all air and sealed the bag as if it had been bought in the store. The price was a bit stiff but after using the machine now for a week I have no buyers remorse.
Minimal clean up, basically wipe down the chamber when finished, hold down the lid and put the lid lock in place.
This is a great machine and I would recommend it to anyone working in bulk like hunters and fisherman.