When redesigning out kitchen we decided to have red accents and this beautiful coffee machine fit in really well. I bought it because I love coffee and also because of the good reviews that I had read on here and other sites. Initially I thought it was quite expensive for a coffee machine, but decided to go ahead and treat myself.

Looks wise it's pretty distinctive and I'm sure you've all seen the tv adverts when it first came on the market. What you can't really see on this picture is that at the back there is a removeable 600ml water tank that is clear. It also has a removable drip tray, making cleaning easy and rubber feet to stop it sliding around on your kitchen top. I find the logos are pretty discreet too, so all in all I think it looks really funky.

That's about where my enthusiasm ended, when it arrived we only got 6 pods of coffee to try (not many considering the machine is over £100) and I found that I probably needed a linguistics degree to understand the instruction booklet, although as one other reviewer says it does have plenty of recipes to try...if you can figure them out. I don't find the machine particularly intuitive either, you have to be very precise about measuring the water you put into it, otherwise you will end up with weak coffee.

I also have a bit of a problem with how wasteful the whole machine is in terms of the coffee, which comes in pods. Sometimes you need 2 pods per drink (milk plus chocolate and coffee) and the pods are one use only so you end up with a lot of waste even if you only have one or two drinks a day. Also the pods themselves are non-recyclable, which is something Nescafe really should improve on. I will probably require my own landfill site if I continure to use this machine, but then I do drink a lot of coffee!

Onto the cost of the pods themselves, well even with using two pods per drink each cup of coffee works out at about 40p, which is much less than say Starbucks, but more expensive than regular filter coffee. Also the milk pods seem to be sweetened, which is not something I like at all as I never put sugar in my coffee. There are a decent range of pods to try, but you're looking at spending quite a bit of money to try them all. Finally if you have a few friends over you're going to find yourself in the kitchen for quite a while trying to get them their coffees ready.

I suppose that although the coffee that I've managed to get from this machine is nice, it's quite faffy to use and for that reason alone it has been relegate back in the cupboard.