Customer Reviews

Demy Kitchen Safe Touchscreen Recipe Reader

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have been wanting to purchase this since way before it was released - I would go to the website and dream about all the cool ways to use it. So, when I was given some money and gift certificates for my birthday, I ordered the Demy right away.

It arrived yesterday, and having played with it for several hours (including adding recipes and "cookbooks"), I have several observations.

Pros:
1. Solid construction and intuitive use. The power button is on the bottom and is easy to spot. On either side of the power button are the sockets for the usb cable (included) and the charger (also included). They both have rubber covers that can be placed over the outlet when they are not being used to prevent food getting inside.

2. Able to change font size and brightness level. There are 3 settings for each, making it nice when you're looking at the screen around a big mixing bowl, etc. You can also change the time before the Demy dims and before it "sleeps".

3. The included "gadgetry" in the software. The conversion calculator, the 3 timers, the substitution list - all are terrific. And of course, the ability to put recipes in separate folders ("cookbooks").

4. The recipe input process is fairly painless. I'm a quick typist, so I chose to input my recipes myself rather than paying to have them scanned for me, and the area to input recipes is easy to use. It's a nice, clean interface and is also easy to copy-and-paste if there are favored recipes on other websites.

Cons:
1. The cookbooks that the Demy came pre-loaded (as well as the individual recipes) cannot be deleted *at this time*. I just spoke to someone in Customer Service, and apparently this option will not be available until mid-August at the earliest.

2. The cookbooks/recipes that are already on the Demy DO NOT show up on the recipe website. So for example, one of the pre-loaded cookbooks is "Beef and Pork". If you decide you like that cookbook and want to load a favorite beef recipe into that cookbook - it doesn't work because since they don't register on the website, there is no way to add them.

3. There is no way to add/delete recipes or cookbooks right on the Demy. A small issue, but one that would be tremendously nice to have. There is also no way to search by keywords, so if you're looking for a specific recipe that doesn't have one of the ingredients in the title, you're out of luck. The index only lists recipes alphabetically.

4. There is no way to delete cookbooks you add personally. That's right - if you add a cookbook and decide you want to delete it in favor of something else, it will delete on the website but NOT on the Demy. For example, when I realized that I couldn't access the Beef and Pork cookbook, I wondered if adding an identically titled cookbook would help by taking the place of the first one, allowing me to access it. Nope. I got two identically titled cookbooks - no big deal, until I realized after deleting it on the website that it will not come off the Demy.

5. While the Demy will "sleep" after whatever preset time you program, it will not turn off, so it still sucks battery power. To actually turn the machine off, you have to hold the power button in the back until it beeps. Of course, if your machine does turn off (battery dies, etc.), then when you power it back on, rather than going back to the recipe you were using, it takes you back to the home screen, leaving you to find your place again. Small issues, but ones that would be nice if they were fixed. It would be nice to have my original place come back first, particularly if I'm in the middle of a dish.

6. Another small complaint is the process for adding recipes to the website. I either have to type them all in myself, or pay something like 50 cents per recipe to the companion site to have them loaded to the website for me. So, if like many, I get this machine to store a lot of loose recipes, that's either a bunch of typing over a long period of time, or a fair amount of money. While I'm no software guru, I would think it would be possible to scan my own recipes in, rather than typing them all by hand. And for any recipes stored on my computer, like a photo program, the software could scan my computer and create a file to load.

Quite honestly, for the price of this item, most of these things should have been taken care of before it was released. I love the idea of the Demy, and would love to keep it, but the execution of the software leaves a lot to be desired and makes it much more clunky than helpful. I am honestly thinking hard about returning it until a later date when I know that these issues (or at least the big ones) will have been fixed.

Update:
As of this week you can now remove the preloaded recipes from the Demy by e-mailing the tech support people & just giving them the e-mail address (not the password) associated with your [...] account. It's an all or nothing process (i.e. you can't select which recipes you want removed) but at least you can get those old cookbooks off.
I've also had some discussions with the support people and 'in the works' is going to be an option to search recipes by tags so you'll, hopefully, be able to tag recipes and then find all the 'chicken & garlic" ones without having to scroll thru everying. For now my work around has been to create multiple cookebooks & since you can have a recipe in more than one cookbook I've used those as 'drill down' tags.

I've had the unit for over a month but didn't appreciate it's full value until today when they finally got the synchronization software working.
The Demy is basically a touchscreen, full color, loose leaf cookbook with added functionality.
The reason that I call it a loose leaf cookbook is that by setting up a free account at [...] you can type in all your recipes that you've collected from newspapers, magazines, the internet, etc. and have them downloaded to the device. If you're too lazy to type them in yourself, for a price, key ingredient's partner will scan them in for you so that you can download them to the unit. The 250 recipes that come preloaded on the unit cannot be removed but when you download your own recipes they show up alphabetized in their own file (cookbook) so that you can find them easily by either scrolling thru the list of recipes or typing in the first letter of the dish's name and having that part of the alphabet in the list show up.
You can create as many cookbooks on the [...] website as you want and your recipes can show up in as many cookbooks as you'd like. For example I have one cookbook for internet recipes, one for newspaper recipes and one for holiday recipes. Some of the recipes I have will show up in both the internet & holiday 'cookbooks' making it easy to set up as many cookbooks as you want each containing only the menu you want for a particular event (this is only really useful for events, such as Thanksgiving, where you have the same recipe every time (like the stuffing). I wish you could create new cookbooks on the unit but right now that's not possible. You can create a 'favorite recipe' quick list on the Demy where you can list menu for a meal but can only make one of these at a time.

Some of the other functionality include:
1) 3 separate cooking timers
2) A conversion function so that you can convert tbls. to cups, etc.
3) A substitution function so that if you're out of baking powder it will tell you how to substitute baking soda.

All and all it's a fun unit but I'd only recommend it for people comfortable with installing software and working with websites for their databases.

I got this for Christmas from my hubby and I absolutely LOVE it! I initially saw this in a cooking magazine in November and was drawn to it as I'd never seen anything like it...basically it's like a Kindle for my kitchen! I read all the reviews I could find, went to the Key Ingredient website to read up on it, and ultimately decided I needed this (I really did too, my recipes were scattered ALL OVER this house). Some of the main problems people had with this device when it first came out seem to have been taken care of.

The Demy comes with a bunch of recipes preloaded on it. Some people may like this, but from what I've seen, many do not. I went through them all and only found one recipe out of the bunch I was interested in keeping, so I moved it to one of my personal cookbooks. If you email Key Ingredient support and let them know you want them removed, they'll get back to you VERY quickly (I heard back from a rep within 10 minutes) and tell you they've deleted them for you, and the next time you sync your Demy to your Key Ingredient account, they'll all be gone (and they mean ALL, you can't pick and choose, so if you see something you like, make sure you add it to one of your own cookbooks). Also, I guess you used to not be able to delete cookbooks or recipes that you added to your account, well, this has been changed as well. You can now delete anything you add.

It does take a little time to add your recipes to your KI acct, but many of mine were from places like 'Taste of Home' or 'Kraft Foods', so I was able to cut and paste the picture and the recipes to my KI page. When you've entered in all your recipes and downloaded the software from their webpage, just plug your Demy in, hit the sync button on your browser, and all your stuff gets transferred to the device. Simple! ****Everything you do is through the website, you cannot add or delete recipes from the device itself.****

My only complaint about this gadget (and it's pretty small), is there's a font button that lets you select how large you want the text to be. I like mine in the middle, however the device will not remember this. So every time you turn the Demy on for use, is automatically goes to the smallest text. Not the end of the world really, just a minor annoyance. The graphics are very bright and clear, and shows photos of your recipes without any issue. I've used the converter tool a bunch of times already, and the three built-in timers are very handy if you're cooking more than one thing at a time.

Overall, I DEFINITELY recommend this if you're like me...someone who has a million single recipes or cooking magazines lying around. I would find a recipe in a magazine that I wanted to try, earmark the page, only to have it get tossed somewhere, or buried under older mags. This device lets me keep everything in ONE place! I have a Demy cookbook of my family's favorites, another one for recipes I'd like to try, and so on. When I try something new, it's a cinch to move it over to my family favorites cookbook, or to delete it if it was no good. This may not be for everyone as it is a bit steep in price, but if you cook often and want to get more organized, I absolutely think this is a good investment. I use mine almost every night.

Our Demy stopped working after 5 months. The staff couldn't have been nicer. They responded immediately and sent us a new one even though it was out of warranty.

Upon receiving the Demy Recipe Reader, we found the product to be of good quality and an easy to use 'user interface' for looking up recipes. It's durable, very clear font for reading recipes and plenty of capacity for our recipe library.

Several downsides:

Boot up time slow: We don't leave the unit plugged in and turned on 24x7 given it wouldn't be a 'green' thing to do by wasting energy. Boot time is rather slow when you just want to 'flip' to a recipe and pull something up

Cost: $300 is steep for the level of technology. I think a more competive price for the technology would be in the $100-$125 range.

Loading Recipes: In order to load recipes into the unit, you must do this via a web-based account. So, even your existing recipes have to be entered on the web and then downloaded to the unit via a USB interface. I would've preferred to see a direct method for entering recipes into the unit.

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?

I've been waiting for a product like this for a long time. Unfortunately, the Demy disappoints.

It's convenient to have the Demy in the kitchen instead of a pile of printed recipes. But there are some problems. It is slow to charge and very slow to power on. Although the Demy is supposed to recognize when it's been rotated and adjust the screen view accordingly, sometimes I have to turn the Demy around multiple times until it recognizes that it needs to adjust the screen. This is a big pain, especially when your hands are dirty.

The real problem with this product lies in its interaction with the web site. To put your own recipes on the Demy you must do so through the web site, so, in my opinion, the functionality of the site is every bit as crucial as the product itself. Unfortunately, the site is nothing short of painful to use. I have tested it on three different browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera), and, depending on which browser you use, the web site will have different issues. Sometimes it incorrectly displays the number of recipes you have in a given cookbook. Sometimes it incorrectly displays your tags. Sometimes it will load a blank page when you try to save changes you've made to a recipe. I have complained to customer service multiple times about these issues, but thus far they have made no attempt to fix them.

When you have your recipes added to the web site, you need to sync your Demy with your computer in order to transfer your recipes from the web site to the Demy. Just now, I had a failed sync. I deleted a recipe from the web site, but, no matter how many times I sync, the recipe will not come off the Demy. So it looks like I'm forever stuck with a recipe that I no longer want.

This product has been out far too long to still have not resolved these basic functionality issues. I even have the updated version, and still, it is full of bugs. I don't have much confidence for the future of this product. It is certainly not worth the price. If this had not been a gift, I would return it.

I've been able to learn to use this excellent device. Having the ability to take the Demy into the kitchen and have access to all recipes is invaluable. The larger font capability makes it even easier to read without using my glasses. I did, however, encounter a small problem with not having a complete manual to refer to in a couple of the functions. The main one is the correct way to turn the device on when it goes to sleep. My work-around solution is to set the go to sleep button to over an hour during the time I'm using it in the kitchen. I'd definitely recommend this product.

I am just the type of cook the Demy was meant for. I collect recipes from magazines, emails and websites, and have them printed in a giant, disorganized binder that takes up a lot of space in my kitchen. Furthermore, when I see a new recipe online, I often try it before I print, so have many a night brought my laptop into the kitchen to test a recipe directly from a web-site. Not safe for me or my laptop! And all of the recipe printing is definitely not eco-friendly.

I did an internet search a few months ago to see if there were any digital recipe storage solutions. I found the Demy and was a little skeptical at first after reading the reviews here. However, I did see that many of the older complaints had been fixed and it sounded like customer support would be really helpful if I had issues, so I went ahead and got a Demy of my own. With the experience I have had using and uploading recipes onto my Demy, I simply had to write a review so that more people could see how great this product is and how much it has been improved since those old reviews. First, I will share what I love about it personally, then I will address some of the complaints from older reviews.

In a phrase, the Demy has revolutionized my kitchen. My bulky 3-ring binder has now been replaced by the small, sleek Demy. I can very quickly and easily search for recipes in my personally created cook books (I chose to do them as categories, i.e. Desserts, Chicken, Appetizers, etc.). I love that there are 3 timers (so you can time multiple parts of a meal concurrently), the measurement conversion tool (which actually came in handy my first time using the Demy), and the short list feature (you can store recipes for a big meal like Thanksgiving, or like me, my dinner recipes for the week). I have not yet had a chance to use the ingredient substitution tool, but love the feature since you never know when you are baking and may find you are out of something and need to substitute on the fly. I also love the "Post to Key Ingredient" option on your web browser (but will go into that more later), this one little button is a life-saver for me. Not to mention that this product is just cool. I have been bragging about it to all my friends, as I feel like I have such a high-tech kitchen!

OK, now to address some of the issues people had in old reviews: First, removing pre-loaded recipes from the Demy. This is no longer an issue. I was able to remove all the pre-loaded cook books myself. Second, deleting your own recipes from the Demy. Apparently in older models you could not delete recipes you added to the Demy, even on a sync when deleted from Key Ingredient. Then the next generation, you had to call customer service to have them delete the recipes for you. Well, now I have had no issues deleting a recipe on Key Ingredient, then on my next sync it is automatically removed from the Demy. Third, the time it takes to get your recipes onto the Demy initially. While this is definitely a project, it is not as bad as it sounds. It gave me a chance to audit which recipes from my binder and email folders that I wanted to keep, many of the recipes I had already existed on the Key Ingredient site from other members, so I just needed to clone them to my library, the "import" feature allows for easy recipe copy/pasting if you have them on Word docs (or even from a website)... but best of all is the "Post to Key Ingredient" button you can download for your browser. Oh man, was this a life-saver for me since many of my recipes are from websites like BHG, All Recipes, Kraft Foods, Cooking Light, etc. You just click the button and the recipe is automatically posted to your Key Ingredient library, formatted perfectly. This will also be helpful to me going forward since I find most of my new recipes online via email blasts from BHG, All Recipes, etc. When I find one I like, I can just click that button and I'll be all set next time I sync my Demy. Fourth, all adding/deleting of recipes must be done on the Key Ingredient website and aren't live on the device until you sync it. This has not been an issue for me. In fact, it allows me to add to and update my cook books from work, home, on the go, etc. It is also easy and quick to search and organize your cook books this way anyway. Regarding the sync, it syncs super quickly, and has so far not been an inconvenience at all. I just keep the USB wrapped up with a twist tie in my "junk drawer" for quick access when I need to do a sync, and bring my laptop in. Fifth, I think there was some complaint about the Demy using battery even when idle or "sleeping," and not powering down automatically (just going to sleep). Since it is kitchen safe, I have just left it plugged in so can not speak to this issue, but do not see it being a problem since a) I can leave it plugged in, and b) it powers down quickly with one button click, and boots up quickly as well if I did want it to turn off when I am done with it.

Long story short, I LOVE my Demy, and will never go back to my old way of doing things. I hope that people are not turned off of this great product by the 2-3 year old reviews that are simply not relevant anymore.

Great!!! Makes cooking so much easier and less messy! I LOVE THIS PRODUCT. Very easy to use. THe only downside is that the DEMY comes preloaded with recipes that cannot be deleted. You can create subfolders to keep your recipes separated though.