Interesting oven interface

Has anyone else seen this new range from LG? It features individual digital control of each cooktop element. Very techy. Digital control of the oven has been standard for many years now, but I’ve never seen digital control of the elements. Is it too complex for consumers? Will it catch on? Could be a game changer…

It’s certainly interesting. Lets hope they have the UI nicely sussed to you can adjust setting nice and quickly, I wouldn’t want to have to fiddle round with my arm/hand over steam/hot oil!

It does appear as if there is a individual control for each hob and the oven. Surely a method to select what you want to do, which would then allow a bigger area (iPod style gesture enabled touchscreen perhaps?) to turn things up or down would be better?

Exactly! I can’t imagine how they thought this was a great idea.

Nonetheless, it is very interesting. And surely aimed at induction cooking that heats pans very quickly. I still prefer gas myself, I wonder why this couldn’t be done with a. a a gas stove and b. touch button interface on the front for the burners?

I don’t need a Hi-Tech range. Give me some nice gas burners, some knobs, an oven that cooks evenly with a timer and I am all set. There is no need for all of that.

To me it looks like a step backwards in time. Very daunting display/interface. I get this old washingmachine vibe from it.

And yeah, who wants to have their arms above food in progress more than necessary?




EDIT:

Says that it’s discontinued on LG’s homepage.
http://www.lg.com/us/appliances/ranges/LG-electric-range-LRE30955ST.jsp

To me baking is chemistry and needs fairly precise control, which we already have. Cooking on the other hand is all about the senses, you know when it needs to be hotter or colder based on what you hear, smell and see. There are too many variables involved to make precise control useful.

Also I thought about how this would work when making beer…not well at all. I could see myself making an even bigger mess using this stove. How do you quickly/safely turn down the temp on 3 gallons of wort before it boils over? I guess I am not in their target demographic though.

BTW, visited Sears this weekend. I saw another oven from an American brand with a digital interface too. Kinda weird.

On the topic of oven interfaces, Fridgidaire’s products I think follow a bad convention. You enter in things like temperature or time by switching to the appropriate mode, and then you confirm this choice by not touching anything until it beeps.

It might sound nice, in that you can just punch in “450” and walk off, but there’s that doubt in the back of my mind it really got set… So I tend to go back and check on it and in the process change the temperature, and now I have to ignore it again - not until the elements actually turn on do I know anything is going to really happen!

Let’s clarify for a second here, the new interface that it seemed spark the original post was the digital COOKTOP interface on this RANGE. Digital / touch interfaces on OVENS are pretty standard and have been around for quite sometime, and these are not very new for electric or induction cooktops either, this does represent one of very few digital/touch interfaces for a cooktop on a RANGE (oven/cooktop combo). I would tend to agree that the place of the controls on the back console (forcing you to reach over the potentially hot cooktop for an adjustment that make take longer than a quick turn of a knob) seems less than ideal.
The elimination of the knobs does help with a cleaner aesthetic, but I don’t see the trade off with usability that I suspect has happened is acceptable. My range has the console and knobs all placed in front of the cooktop (over the oven door) and I didn’t fully appreciate that configuration until I had used it for awhile then moved for several months and cooked on a range with the knobs behind the cooktop.

I saw an interesting oven the other day where they had the standard knobs along the front with a little LED display of the temperature on the panel just in front of the knob. Instead of turning the knob to control the amount of gas you would turn the knob only about 30 degrees left or right, hold it there, and the temp would increase or decrease. Not sure if this is common but i hadnt seen it before.

mas2: that sounds like a more sound solution than buttons. The possible values that one sets a burner is so varied, it seems like a chore to reduce that to hitting a button 18 times to get to the temperature that you want. Moreover, every recipe I’ve ever used states things like “medium” or “low heat”. Never a precice number. Why try to put a precise control on something that doesn’t need that precision?

Why…

…are all the controls for making things hot…

…positioned so you have to reach over the hot things…

…to use them?

I’ve always wondered what the rationale for this was, because the vast majority of ranges are arranged like this.

-Josh

^ Because that is better than making them accessible to young children by having them above the oven lid.

EngineerErrant: Because it takes less wiring or tubing to run up the back of an oven than all the way to the front. Marketing and/or sales came up with the safety factor.

Think about these two scenarios involving small children:

  1. Controls are on the front. Child turns on a burner. Walks away. Oven is on for four hours until an adult notices that the burner is on and turns it off.

  2. Controls on the back. Child crawls on top of oven to play with controls. Burns itself on the hot burner. Gets a bad burn because they can’t pull off of the burner quickly (there whole body is laying on it) or they get injured falling off the oven to get away from the heat.

Here’s me, wading into the conversation late, as usual. … .

Love all this digital stuff, but not as much as an old, match-lit, gas oven. There’s something about having to “make” fire to cook that is fulfilling; I find the “scale” a little more human as well. We had an old Merrit-O’keefe exactly like this one for years. And since the piezo-ignitor on our GE gas cook top died we’re back to where we were in 1971 … lighting a match to cook dinner.

Thinking about your safety-points Mr leads me to the logical “digital” solution … a Password to “lock” the range controls. But then there are obvious problems with that solution as well, like, “Honeee … sorry to bother you at work, we need to go out for dinner tonight, I forgot the password to the oven … and haven’t received a new one from the Customer Service yet.

I’ve got a fancier digital Jenn Air oven in my apartment. First time I ever couldn’t cook because the damn OVEN crashed.

Luckily I discovered that I could reboot said oven by turning off the breaker and letting it reset. Apparently the oven firmware needs an update.

Yes - totally serious and completely ridiculous. I too miss my old gas “insert match here” oven. Even when the power would go out we always knew we’d be able to cook.

LMO: you should have patented that password idea. That’s a perfect application. Great sales point and it could lead to less accidents.

you should have patented that password idea. That’s a perfect application. Great sales point and it could lead to less accidents.

I dunno Mr … as it is, it seems like I have to get out the damned owner’s manual for our new Bosch oven every other time I want to try something different.

I still tend toward the K.I.S.S principle. A two-handed “interlock” might be better than another ee-lek-tronic geegaw (other than the expense of another $.17 switch (you know how bean-counters are)).

i.e. the safety switches found on punch-presses, where both hands must be on controls at both sides of the machine before it will activate. A little anthropometric-googling would reveal the average wing-span of a four year old and the switches would be located accordingly; the left hand holds down the “lock-set” button, while the right hand selects the temperature … once the hob (love that word (don’t know why)) is in use subsequent temperature adjustments could be enabled without the inconvenience of having to hold down the “lock-set” (after all, by default, someone old enough is already present to monitor the kids).

But you’re right, I’m still amazed that after 70+ years of manufacturing gas and electric stove, and many thousands of injuries to children and elderly folks, that a safety lock-out feature hasn’t evolved.

Too bad ideas are so cheap, huh? Besides, it’s already been done… United States Patent 5530230

I think that range’s controls are just about as good as this dialog for controlling my car’s steering:
SteeringDialog2.jpg