Demy Kitchen Safe Touchscreen Recipe Reader
by Demy
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Product Summary
Manufacturer: DemyBrand: Demy
Release Date: 2010-03-01
Model: Demy0001
Product features:
- Kitchen-safe touchscreen recipe reader that holds your personal recipe collection in one compact device
- 7-inch touchscreen with an intuitive graphical navigation interface, adjustable font size
- Comes pre-loaded with 250 recipes; can store up to 2500 recipes
- Accesses recipes saved to Key Ingredient web site; syncs via included USB cable conneced to PC
- Splash-resistant design and sturdy plastic exterior can be cleaned with damp cloth
Kitchen and Housewares Reviews of Demy Kitchen Safe Touchscreen Recipe Reader
Customer Review: An enigma
Summary: 3 Stars
I've been online since 1997 and likely started gathering digital recipes about the same time. My digital cookbook houses about 1700 different recipes for everything from bath bubbles and glue to bouillabaisse and sesame halvah. When I got the Demy, it came as a complete surprise. I had seen an HP product last year that was being marketed as a digital touch screen recipe reader but it was quite pricy and the economy being what it's been, I put off that idea until more affluent times arise. Opening this on Christmas morning was one of those wowow moments, the perfect gift for me. ( I have a great wife!) Getting those printed versions of my recipes out of my cupboard is something I've been longing to do! (room for MORE spices!!!)
The Demy is about the size of a hardbound book. It sits on an angle either flat or vertical and the screen reverses depending on its positioning. As with most devices these days, it has a touch screen. Onboard, we have a fixed software that allows for the viewing of recipes. It also has a conversion facility, a substitution table, a set of three digital timers. I also has a shortlist facility that allows you to open multiple recipes at one time. The screen font can be adjusted to one of three sizes which is helpful for the visually impaired.
Now before I go any further and semi trash this device I need to say two things. One, the idea about the device, a semi splash proof digital kitchen recipe reader is beyond worth, of enormous use to me so whatever it's shortcomings, it's value remains unimpeachable and for this reason, I find the device so very enignmatic. Two, I have Apple products in the house and I have become a bit of a tech snob. Simply put I prefer excellence in my electronics.
That said, so far the Demy appears to do all that I've said it can do but... on a budget. It's just so much less than it could have been. In my house, we all have smart phones. My kids are watching videos on their phones, my wife is checking her email on her Ipod etc..Suddenly here I am with the latest tech for my kitchen and I have a device that JUST reads recipes. That's ok, don't get me wrong, like I said the idea is perfect but why do I have to hook a USB cord up to it and plug it into my PC to facilitate loading recipes on it? Every thing in my house is now suddenly on my wireless network and this thing has a leash. Further to that, the Demy has a wee digital keyboard. I do not know why it has a wee digital keyboard. There is nothing, repeat, NOTHING, that you can do on the machine with it. It is decorative. Any and every recipe on the unit first has to be uploaded to the website at KeyIngredient.com and then formatted and saved. On the short end it takes as little as a minute to do a quick cut and paste, reformat and save for a recipe. On the long end, if you are doing a photo with it, nutrition contents, you can spend upwards of 10 minutes on a recipe and that's if you are motivated. Add to that that quite often the site is not working and you don't discover that until you try to add a recipe, whereupon you just lose your work....grr.
I am an impatient and tenacious man when it comes to stuff like this and while I have slacked off in the last week on loading recipes, I've pretty much been hard at it since Christmas day. I'm about 2/3 of the way, 1200 or so recipes. Holy cats it's been a lot of work. Along the way, as you add recipes, you need to hook your Demy up to your PC and then sync it with a small program you have to download. What the program does is simply mirror whatever you have on the KeyIngredient site onto your Demy. So as you go, cooking, loading recipes etc...if you notice anything that needs changing, editing etc.. you'll need to go back to your PC, login, make changes, then re-sync your Demy. If you open the wee digital keyboard, just bite your tongue, its just for show, ignore it, it does nothing.
Still, I have 1200 of my recipes in my kitchen now and thats just awesome.
The touchscreen itself. I need to nibble on that a bit. Like I said, we have Apple in the house and we basically cut our touchscreen teeth on Apple products, which, rock. I thought all touchscreens therefore rocked. I was wrong. The Demys touchscreen works. Be patient, you will learn grasshopper, to move slowly. It's hard, you'll be trying to move the screen up and instead, you'll open up a folder titled Beef - Veal. Despite my most earnest intentions, I am doing this quasi-regularly and am basically getting used to it. At first though, I thought it shamefully inappropriate for tech in my house to be so substandard ( jk.. sorta)
The list of it's deficiencies gets even longer and this one is just a slap in the face. It has a coversion facility. Convert 1.2 kilos to (oh whoops, 1 1/5 kilos, it don't do decimals) to pounds, 2.65 lbs (notice the decimals!). However, the very first thing I needed to covert was grams to ounces. So I did. On the Demy, 45 grams becomes 1,587,328.29 ounces. That answer is exactly 1,000,000 times the real answer which is 1.59 ounces. I actually wrote to KeyIngredient about that and they wrote back saying that, "yeah, it's a known problem. Anything else we can help you with?"
I then wrote the poor guy back and asked what the hell made him think I would be willing to ask him for more help when on the very first thing I asked him for help with he'd failed so spectacularly?
He didn't write back. Sigh.
In the end what I have is a really really useful tool executed by a group of chimpanzees from Texas. I've been to Austin, loved the place. How did this Gump of a device come out of there..oh hey, wait a minute...lol.
Its the single most useful addition to my kitchen in years and its a low tech non marvel with hinky software and an archaic interface. Despite it's myriad shortfalls, if you are a foody, I would recommend getting a machine like this (HP MAKES ONE!!!). Maybe not this machine specifically but at 200$, it certainly is the most affordable. My only real regret so far is for the countless hours I have spent loading my recipes onto it and knowing as I do so that at the first opportunity, I will ditch this machine and have to do it all over again. Then I stop and think, no I won't, with any other machine I'll just be sending or aquiring my recipes wirelessly and using onboard editors that recognize Word formatting. It will probably take me 10 minutes to load all 1700 recipes.
I love this thing and it blows chunks. How's that for enigmatic?
Description of Demy Kitchen Safe Touchscreen Recipe Reader
The Demy is the world?s first touchscreen, kitchen-safe digital recipe reader. The Demy is designed to deliver a complete recipe collection to cooks in the kitchen. The Demy also includes handy tools like 3 kitchen timers, a measurement conversion calculator and an ingredient substitution dictionary to get cooks out of a pinch if they are one special ingredient short. The Demy is designed to thrive in the unpredictable and often messy kitchen environment. Its high resolution, capacitive glass touchscreen packs a sealed 7? monitor into a footprint of just a 5 x 7 card. The Demy can also stand upright, taking up the counter space of just a 3 x 5 card. The screen rotates automatically for easy viewing. Each Demy recipe collection is powered by the KeyIngredient website, the best place to find, create, share and collect all of your recipes. The Demy unit comes pre-loaded with 250 recipes and has the capacity to hold 2,500 recipes complete with photographs, descriptions, ingredients and steps. And your complete recipe collection on KeyIngredient can be synced to your Demy in minutes with the included USB cable. The Demy puts all of your recipes at the tip of your finger.Cook's Tools & Gadgets
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