GREAT ESPRESSO EXTRACTION, MEDIOCRE PRODUCT DESIGN

Starting with the good news - this one is making one heck of a great espresso. Terrific crema and great flavor and aroma extraction. I also love the fact that I don't need to wait between the espresso brewing cycle and the milk frothing - a great improvement over earlier generation Saeco machines. As a side note - I have been a Saeco customer for 7-8 years now.

Now for the not-so-great news:
I have been involved in product management for close to 15 years now and as the product design go the Talea has really managed to annoy me on several important levels. Here is a quick list of design issues that make this machine only a 3 star out of possible 5 starts in my book:
- There is only one warning light to indicate a problem, yet some 3-4 common issues that could trigger that light. This means that when the warning light turns on and the cycle halts or refuses to start I need to run a full check on all the possible items that could go wrong before I find the issue.
- The water tank is hidden and so there is no indication to the user when the water are running low. Accordingly the user may get stuck in the middle of preparing a cup of, say, cappuccino with the espresso coffee waiting for the forth milk to come while I am rushing to refill the water tank.
- The bean holder is shallow and wide, rather than having more of a funnel shaped which leads to constant need to manually push beans to the grinder to use them all.
- The various machine parts don't fit too well together, i.e., the mechanical tolerance is somewhat relaxed, which means that the red alert light may appear for no good reason and the only solution is go through the entire cycle of pulling out parts and putting them back in place, e.g., take out the filled water tank and put it back in place to make the warning light go away and allow the machine to start operating again.
- Finally and the most annoying of them all - for the first 8-10 months the knob used for frothing would jump out of position while the espresso cycle was going on, killing pressure and stopping the coffee extraction in mid flight. There was no apparent reason for the problem, nor any mentioning of a solution in the product guide or online. The only course of action would be to stand vigilant by the machine as it was extracting the espresso and manually quickly return the know to it center position to continue the extraction cycle before pressure dissipates. Much to my relief and for no apparent reason this problem went away on its own after 8-10 months and now only appears in an irregular fashion (once every 20-30 cycles, instead of in every single cycle).

Bottom line: I appreciate Saeco ability to extract excellent espresso cups, I only wish the attention to the machine design would be better. Would not buy this model again, but may buy another Saeco after examining the machine design more closely than I have in the past.