This is one of the more useful products I've bought from Amazon over the years. Before this one, I had a very bare bones sealer I bought off Wish for 20 bucks. It worked then and it works now still but when I started needing to vacuum seal many small bags of home made candy the cheap one just wasn't cutting it anymore. It would take four hours to vacuum seal a few batches.So I bought this, and I'm generally pretty happy with it. I needed to be able to seal cut out bags from rolls and this does that easily. The sealing strip does get pretty hot (like melt your bags to the point of them falling apart hot) with repeated use but once you get in the rhythm of it it's easy to stop the sealer after a second or two to prevent melting. I also needed to be able to stop the vacuum at any time to seal and this allows that too, pretty flawlessly. Lastly I needed to be able to control how hard the vacuum removes air given the bag contents and this allows that with its Normal or Gentle modes, as well as the Wet or Dry food modes. My last sealer didn't have any of these options.- it was either on or off so it would smash certain foods to the point of it being worthless before sealing it.So, after using this for a few hours over the course of my first week having it I'm really happy with it. So far it's done everything I need it to do quickly and effectively, though I do have a few small complaints. The first of which I wish the operation buttons weren't directly in the middle of the unit because at first trying to close the lid on the machine would result in my brushing one of the buttons and changing my settings, or in the worst case scenario the sealer would start before the vacuum even occurred sealing off the bag while it's full of air, requiring me to start over. Actual physical buttons instead of basically a touch screen would have fixed this, or moving the buttons to the top of the unit. My second complaint is that you really need to apply some pressure to lock the lid, which is another reason why you might brush against one of the panel buttons and have the machine start doing something you don't want. I do, however, understand somewhat the need for a tight seal for the vacuum to work but this does seem excessive, almost like when you first get it you feel like you might break the machine trying to lock the lid. Over the time I've used it I've gotten used to it but at first it seems odd needing to apply fifty pounds of force to lock the lid. I also know this isn't necessary as my cheap unit I've had didn't need this kind of force to operate... You could actually just lightly hold the top down with your palm and it would operate just fine.I've seen some reviews talking about how the machine was broken when they got it, and read some unhappy customers responding to Customer Questions on this page and my best guess is that they don't know how to operate the machine properly. I definitely wouldn't suggest a frail or weak person buy this unit because locking the lid repeatedly could become stressful, but there is also a slight learning curve to these machines and I can see why some people would be frustrated by it. Overall I'm pretty happy with my purchase and very happy with the amount of time I've saved in just a week strictly in vacuum sealing my products, it's cut the time down by more than half. I'd recommend this.