Review on 🍚 Panasonic 5 Cup Rice Cooker - Fuzzy Logic, One-Touch Cooking for Brown, White, Porridge, Soup - SR-DF101 (White) - 1.0 Liter Capacity by Neil Bodell

We've been using National (Panasonic brand) rice cookers and high end Panasonic rice cookers for - I don't know, probably decades. We bought this to replace another Panasonic 5 cup when the silicone seals finally broke after years of use. We received it on December 3, 2020 and it stopped working in mid-February. Now it just shows error code "H 02” and doesn't work at all. Looks like we'll have to pay shipping to a central service center for warranty repairs. Totally disappointed with this model. Pros (while it lasted): - Nice design - slightly thinner than our old Panasonic 5 cup model. - It fries rice very well - nice and fluffy. Better than our old "Fuzzy Logic" Panasonic model, IMO. Although not recommended by the manufacturer, it keeps white or brown rice warm and ready to eat for up to 24 hours without the rice drying out or becoming too hard and brittle. While all Panasonic rice cookers we've owned have been able to do this, the 10-cup Zojirushi we have dries rice overnight, so the cooked rice needs to be stored in the fridge and steamed in the microwave the next night . . This is what I like best about Panasonic rice cookers and is really the main reason I keep buying them. The Teflon coating of the pot seems appropriate - about the same as on our previous models. Cons: - The waterline to the pot seems too high compared to all other rice cookers we've had. Not critical, but a little awkward at first as pouring water down the appropriate lines resulted in wet, mushy rice - both white and brown. We need to use less water than indicated by the lines on the pan. The timer function on this new model is a lot more tedious than on the older models we owned. You have now set it to run a certain number of hours (depending on the type of rice you are cooking) before the rice should be ready. With our previous Panasonic rice cookers, you could simply dial in the time you wanted the rice to be ready and the rice cookers would automatically start cooking when needed. I suspect Panasonic didn't want to put a battery in this model to keep track of the current time. (We left our older models plugged in all the time so we never had to change their batteries.) - The pot lid gasket (silicone?) seems significantly thinner and therefore less durable than our older Panasonic models, but I guess time has passed will show. - Longevity is questionable considering ours broke within 3 months. This unit is too expensive not to be repaired under warranty, but paying to ship it to a service center adds to the total cost of ownership. We may have just gotten the "lemon" out of the unit, but it leaves a tart taste in our mouths that we'll remember the next time we buy a rice cooker. Rice Cooker from Hawaii to a Panasonic Service Center in Florida via USPS (including return receipt); we do not have "ground" shipping to Florida. Panasonic refunded us but we lost over $60. We won't be buying any Panasonic products in the future that aren't cheap enough to just throw away when they break, or small enough to fit in a flat-rate box. It seems Panasonic has effectively exited the Hawaiian market. Turns out Zojirushi has at least one service center on Oahu. ]