Panasonic Icon MCE593 Review

Overall Rating

Quite pretty - metallic paint job.
Really powerful when it's working.

Loses suction really quickly, especially on fine dust.
Filters require regular cleaning.
Complex hose attachment makes stair-cleaning tricky.

The Panasonic Icon MCE593 is a stylish-looking upright vacuum cleaner, and features a number of novel touches housed within some sweeping, seductive curves. It even has an attractive metallic paint job. But all is not well with this design. In the process of taking the industrial designer's visionary style and tuning this into a functioning product, the engineers at Panasonic failed to adhere to the fundamental engineering tenet. They failed to keep it simple. Starting with where the dust enters, the direct-drive beater unit is well built and powerful, and the transparent section allows you to see its operation. It covers almost the full width of the head, and performs excellently. The large wheels on this model make for easy handling when the cleaner is in use, but these large wheels would make the cleaner topple when upright. So the engineers have added small wheels which extend to stabilise the cleaner when placed upright. These are rather too small, and tend to snag on door thresholds when you're moving the cleaner around. Designing with a large wheel has necessitated the additional complexity of these small retracting wheels which are not really up to the job. Designing with smaller wheels in the first place like every other hoover on the planet would have been a sensible compromise. The stretch hose can be used for access to crevices, but again an overly-complex design blights the functionality. This time it's the addition of a retaining ring half way up the back of the cleaner. The purpose of this seems unclear, but the effect is to prevent the hose reaching it's full potential length, and causing a nasty kink in the hose whenever an attempt is made to stretch out the restrained section. At first the device offers quite amazing suction, but shortly afterwards the filters clog and power is dramatically reduced. The filter is of a circular concertina style, so offers a large surface area, but is more susceptible to clogging than a bag filter. It's also quite tricky to clean. The filtration unit features a "Filter Wiper": a lever you're supposed to flick back and forth to knock the dust from the internal filter, from time to time. This emits a raucous bark as its prongs engage teeth on the internal filter, but despite the exciting sound effects, it appears to be rather ineffectual; it's more effective to bash the filter unit with your hand, or to dismantle the filter housing. A novel pre-filter system separates out the fibres and grit, and when the cleaner is working well you can see the dirt spinning round along with the yellow paddles and brushes of the pre-filter cleaner. The very existance of this is problematic. In a standard bagged vacuum, the mass of fibres usually acts as a filter in its own right, but in this model, the fibres are stripped away and held separately from the fine dust, which settles unimpeded on the internal filter So it would seem that this over-engineered unit with its spinning paddles is actually less effective at maintaining suction than a standard bagged vacuum. Removing the dust canister is easy, with a large spring-loaded handle, although emptying the canister involves decoupling the bayonet-fitting filter housing, and this tends to drop fine dust all over the place. It's when you empty the canister that you can clearly see evidence of the poor performance of this dysfunctional filtration system - the canister contains no fine dust, apart from the stuff knocked from the internal filter - just large fibres and dense grit. One of the nice touches, however, is the satisfying clunk you get when you replace the canister. After the powerful motor there's a HEPA filter to remove dust from the exhaust, which seems functional enough, although it makes no sense to have this in place since emptying the canister is such a messy, dusty process. The tools are adequate and fit comfortably in niches on the back of the unit, and the retractable flex is fit for purpose, but this is all to be expected on a high-end model. The dust sensor and automatic air flow are a bit of a gimmick - honestly, when do you ever use a vacuum cleaner on anything other than full power? In summary, this vacuum cleaner has too many faults to justify its high price tag. While other Panasonic cleaners have proven well-designed, well-constructed, reliable and economical, this one is over-engineered and far too complex, although it is definitely pretty to look at. The massively powerful motor fails compensate for a filtration system that clogs up far too quickly, and emptying the device is both messy and complicated.