Over the last few years, the upscale consumer market for espresso machines has seen a real upsurge in machines that were formerly reserved for the catering and light commercial use marketplace: the espresso machine with a heat exchanger (also known as a HX machine).

It seems anywhere you look online today, the discussion is about machines like the Pasquini Livia, the ECM Giotto, the Isomac Tea and Millennium, the Nuova Simonelli Oscar, or other similar machines. For the most part, these machines are durable, efficient, and produce results. They are also fairly new to the North American marketplace - the Pasquini is probably the oldest continual machine of the bunch, with the Isomacs only coming to our market recently, and the ECM very hard to find until very recently.

With all of this talk, there's a machine that is almost never mentioned, and it's ironic, it is a machine that has been available for almost 20 years now. It is also possibly the most beautiful heat exchanger espresso machine currently available for the home marketplace. The machine is the Elektra Micro Casa Semi Automatica.

As always, I need to point out this is a First Look, not a detailed review. Anything and everything may change between now and the publication of our long term (6+ months planned) Detailed Review. For now, we present you with a few weeks' use of the machine, and our thoughts on it.

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