The DeLonghi CT04E Toaster is one beautiful piece of machinery. Happily being toast, sorry, host, to four pieces of bread, it really does a great job of toasting all breaded goods. Crumpets, baps, scones, even pop tarts are toasted to perfection with this great bit of kit. Everything seems to come out crispy, and the dials to operate the time and level are really intuitive, if a little bit hard to see. (Old folk may have trouble with this.)

The style is a kind of 1950s retro chrome throwback. The kind of thing you'd see in old stylish American diners. This is really charming and the colour goes very well with most kitchens and pantries. The dials looks really stylish and retro, and although the whole thing is incredibly adjustable, all of the displays and dials and bells and whistles that has on it are not nearly as intimidating as they look. No, it has a very intuitive interface.

This is very much a toaster suitable for a family household, since it's a very in-depth experience to use, with its 1-6 control of how brown you want the toast, and more than adequate defrost setting, and of course, who could forget that there are four different slots for the bread. This is ideal for when you have company or if, as I say, you just have a big family.

But the best thing about this device has to be the fact that all of the slots can be used independently of one another, so you can make all kinds of things at the same time to suit everybody's individual tastes, which is bound to impress family and friends. I've found it works particularly well with making Birds Eye Waffles and Pop Tarts, which you can even make simulatenously. This is a real extravagance in my opinion.

The only real problem I have with this toaster is that it's very long, and doesn't fit well on certain counters because it simply takes up far too much space, so it probably wouldn't be suitable in small flats or kitchens, but the style, colour and overall theme matches a lot of recently released electrical goods, and that's always a good thing.

The crumb tray pulls out quite easily and is simple to brush out. I've had this toaster for some time now and it always crisps everything perfectly and never gets too full of crumbs or other nastiness, despite the fact that I'm constantly using it to make pop-tarts.

All in all this is a great toaster, perfect in every way, quite, stylish and very reliable with lots of different applications, apart from its somewhat broad dimension which may render it unsuitable for certain kitchens, and small fonts on the dials which older people or visually impaired people may struggle with.