Emerson Stainless Steel Toaster Oven

Comment: I received this toaster oven as a Christmas gift and should have returned it after the first time I used it. The entire thing gets too hot to touch and it is impossible to gauge how long anything should be left in there for it to be done right.
As of last night, this piece of garbage is sitting on my lawn in the backyard, burnt to a crisp. It caught fire while baking frozen french fries and I'm talking FIRE!!! We are lucky that our house did not burn down.
Do not buy this toaster oven!!!!!!

Comment: This little oven makes the old Easy Bake oven look like a powerhouse. The Emerson TOR49 is a complete piece of junk. It can't even toast bread!? How can they get away with selling such garbage? DO NOT BUY THIS ITEM.

Comment: It IS easy to burn your fingers. In addition it is a very poor toaster because the timer control (how you set the darkness of the toast) has such a wide range (to 30 mins) that the difference between untoasted and burnt is only a few degrees. The dials are very hard to read. Also the timer sometimes gets stuck on if you don't go to > 5mins then back . In the few months I had it, I had to throw away a lot of burnt toast and after the flaming toast incident, I ended up replacing it.

Comment: Before we realized how dangerous this toaster was, it just plain ol' regular sucked. Instead of the typical oven-knob and toaster-settings, this has a knob that you can set as oven temperature or to TOAST. The second knob is a timer. The switch is on and off. So to toast, you have to set the oven to TOAST, and set the timer for whatever length of time you believe to be appropriate.

It takes approximately 5-8 minutes to toast bread.

The oven door is not connected to the grate, so opening the door doesn't pull out your toast or other food - you have to go in and get it. You will burn your hands.

The door is also bordered with metal. Metal is a conductor and will get hot. You will burn your hands.

That's just the DESIGN. Now for the FLAW.

After two months of ownership, the timer started to malfunction. Setting to toast for 5-10 minutes, it would get to the end and not shut off. There would be no "ding" alerting you that your toast was done. and toaster would not automatically turn off. Thus, leaving toast - or in my case, forgetting about toast - in the toaster oven can result in fire. In my case I was lucky enough to suffer only some smoke damage in and around the toaster, but someone else might not be so lucky. This thing is dangerous and should be removed from the market.

Comment: This is clearly a product that has never been user-tested before going on the market, but I suppose "you get what you pay for". It's an affordable oven, not too ugly, and does an OK job. The primary annoying bit is the door handle and surfaces... they are a consistent source of finger burns (I now leave the door open after taking the food out and close it later in the day). The second equally annoying bit is the uneven toasting... if you don't turn your toast over and 180 degrees, it will burn on one end. You definitely need to monitor your food in this oven, especially since the toast settings on the knob are meaningless. And yes, the whole thing gets hot, but that's an easier annoyance to avoid. This toaster is essentially one step up from heating your food over an open flame.