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For Christmas I've agreed to get my mother a replacement Microwave as she has a Medion Microwave which is frankly rubbish. It's a small combination microwave and just a rebranding of a generic Chinese designed microwave. You can't cook porridge in it without it spilling out over the side unless you cook at low power and often food needs to be taken out half-way through cooking and then stirred before continuing cooking.
It's a very crude microwave and the controls are not intuitive to say the least. Neither of us understand it very well it has a weird logic to the way it operates. She nevers uses the grill or convection oven part of it anyway and just wants a simpler microwave that is just a microwave ideally with very simple controls as she is elderly and likes simple stuff nowadays.
My first Microwave was a Panasonic and that was brilliant at cooking, very smooth in cooking and you never had to take the food out half way through cooking to stir and the same is true of my current microwave which is a Sharp model.
Apart from these two brands is there any others that have smooth wave type feature which cooks more smoothly and evenly?
I was looking at a Samsung and the reviews just seem to state its a rebranding of a generic Chinese microwave and doesn't operate very well. They used to be really good in the past but I'm guessing either all their microwaves or at least their entry level models are very basic nowadays. So that brand is out.
I wanted to get her a microwave of at least 27 litres in size (mine is 40 litres) and the Sharp and Panasonic models are quite expensive and also they don't seem to do the models with simple controls nowadays. I'm hoping to get a decent model at a discount on black friday but at this point I don't know what models to look at except Panasonic and Sharp and was hoping for other options.
We originally had a combination one but realised didn’t really use it. We replaced it with a really basic one from Tesco. I can’t see a make on it. Anyway had it over a decade and still going strong. Cooks well. You can use Clubcard or just add points on purchase. It only has two controls. Temperature and defrost settings.
Our microwave decided to blow up and destroy itself... no there was no metal or anything in it, it was only a few years old.
Anyway it meant we needed to replace it (I know it's not essential but it certainly is useful!)
I didn't want anything too fancy but ideally 800w and an alright size. My partner grabbed one from Argos. Now we have a Samsung one and it actually cooks things beautifully.
I'm starting to think the old one was never any good, as the food from the Samsung one had never tasted so fresh and good! This one is much easier to use too.
I'm not sure what the average 800w microwave costs but the model we got in black is down to £84 at the moment. (It's 23 litres though, so might not fit your idea but it's plenty big enough for us.)
You can also get cashback and nectar points depending on how you pay etc. So can save even more.
I just had a quick look online and Robert Dyas looks like it has some great deals on Microwaves. Most under £80 seem to be 700w, if that matters.
Interesting to say about your Panasonic one, my sibling had one and said it was awful, one of the worse microwaves she ever used, didn't last long at all, she might have even sent it back. I don't know the ins and outs but she just said to stay away from them when I said we needed a new one 
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