Only the front of the oven closest to the door, and about an inch from each side wall, cooked a little cooler, about 20 degrees cooler. This is still an impressive result, especially compared to turntable models that don’t even allow you to use most of your microwave space.

Just keep in mind that with sensor cooking, you can’t cover the food and get the same results. It will interfere with the way the microwave detects temperature; That is, resist the temptation to cover food unless you are using basic programmed cooking functions, which also exist. I actually managed to bomb an egg this way without it exploding all over the oven, but the cautious can still cover the egg and cook it in controlled time increments.

The other Achilles heel of oven temperature sensors is a multi-layered food dish. When I reheated a bowl of Korean rice by placing short ribs on top of cabbage and rice, the cabbage didn’t cook as hot as the meat or rice, and I had to mix it up a bit and reheat it. This is, of course, what you would expect to happen in almost all other microwaves. But it’s worth noting that this oven only works magic on flat plates.

Features and more features

Simplicity is the key to this microwave and that’s why I like it: I don’t have to look at it or worry about it. With few exceptions, the oven’s main sensor reheat function will reliably and evenly heat my food to 180 degrees Fahrenheit (or lower if I set the heat to any of the five lowest settings). I’m willing to admit that this is genius.

But the other main features work pretty well too. The Drink button will heat a cup of any liquid to about 170 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest I want for my coffee or tea. Defrost was able to defrost a frozen chicken breast in 10 minutes, while barely heating any part of the meat beyond room temperature. (I also needed to let the chicken breast sit for five minutes, per instructions, for the heat to even out.)

Setting the popcorn is essentially a timer, since infrared sensors can’t see through a bag of popcorn: set the weight of the microwave popcorn bag, then release it. With a bag from Kroger, my results were perfectly acceptable: no burnt popcorn and a few dozen unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bag. Trying to follow the popcorn maker’s instructions, waiting until several seconds passed between popping corn in a high-powered microwave, was close to fire danger. I’ll take the popcorn button.

Classic timed microwave cookers are available, as is manually increasing or decreasing microwave power. Somewhat idiosyncratically for the US market, Panasonic also added a battery of pre-programmed recipes for microwave cooking, whether it’s chicken noodle soup in a bowl or spaghetti bolognese with the meat cooked raw. Microwave cooking from scratch is more common in Japan, where kitchens are small, and apparently these features also show the microwave’s ability to modulate its power settings for precise cooking. But microwave recipes still felt like a time capsule from the ’80s.