Philips 5500 Series review: is this amazing bean-to-cup coffee machine worth its price?

The Philips 5500 series has 20 preset coffee styles - did you know there were 20 types of coffee? | Philips

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A touchscreen, 20 coffee styles, custom profiles and automatic cleaning — this machine promises café-level coffee at home. After weeks of real-world testing, we finally know whether the Philips 5500 Series deserves its luxury reputation

You start off by doing a water test, so it knows how hard or soft your tap water is, and it can compensate with a special descaling filter to ensure you always have perfectly pure water in your coffee.

It has a milk frother, a large bean container, a self-cleaning system, and a gorgeous touch-screen panel with a full-colour display.

It is, not to put too fine a point on it, one of the best coffee machines out there, and I've lived with it for a while to see if it's worth its rather eye-watering £650 price tag.

The gorgeous touch-screen display makes it a doddle to use | Philips

The short answer is, yes. It offers everything you'd expect from such an expensive coffee machine, from its exquisite build quality, to its ease of use and automation, to its hugely adaptable coffee style system.

For example, what sets the 5500 series apart is that it can make 20 different types of coffee. I didn't actually know there were 20 different types of coffee, but they're all there on the LCD screen, in a menu you just pick from.

And it really is just a point-and-shoot procedure. As long as you've got water in the tank, beans in the top, and some milk in the frother if you need it, you literally just press a button and wait for the magic to happen.

Save £100 on the Philips 500 Series with this deal

It's surprisingly quiet, the nozzles that pour out the coffee are adjustable and allow space for anything from an espresso cup to a travel mug, and every time you use it, it spits out a neat "puck" of compacted coffee beans into a discreet compartment, ready for you to recycle it.

You might think choosing between 20 different coffees, each with customisable strengths and sizes, would be a complex affair, but it's really not. The touch-screen is masterfully designed, and it makes it really easy to select your favourite drink.

There's even a comprehensive profile system, so different people can save their perfect setup, ready to repeat it any time at the touch of a button.

I'm making it sound like there's nothing to dislike about the Philips 5500 Series, and that's largely because it's almost perfect - but it does take a while to brew up a cup. If you're serving up drinks for a family get-together or a party, you'll be waiting a while.

The LatteGo milk frothing system works as well as you'd expect - and it's a doddle to clean, too | Philips

This isn't an issue unique to this machine, but you will certainly find it quicker to percolate a big pot in a conventional coffee maker. Although there's an element of theatre in using the 5500 series, and there's obviously a joy in letting people pick any type of coffee they can possibly imagine, and then delivering it a few minutes later.

It's also a bit tricky to get the right size of coffee to fit your mug. The machine offers servings in millilitres, which is fine if you know your cup's capacity, but it takes some learning. And we find most mugs need two separate servings to fill them, which adds a bit of time.

That's pretty much all I can think of to mark the machine down on, though. It genuinely is an absolute joy to use, and it never fails to pour the perfect cup.

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