The Le Duo Juice Extractor is small and stylish enough to leave out on a work surface all the time (which should encourage you to get your daily dose of juice), and the powerful motor does a good job of juicing just about anything.

The juicer bowl fits over the base and locks firmly into place; there are no latches or arrows to remind you how to unlock it and it does lock very firmly so you need to push hard to get it off again. The spout on the side lets the juice pour straight into a jug or glass--though it's not quite high enough to fit a pint glass under.

There are two attachments that fit on top of the juicer bowl: a press for citrus fruits and a juice extractor for any other kind of fruit. The citrus press has a large cone for grapefruit and a smaller cone for oranges; limes and lemons are a little too small to juice effectively but the press is strong enough to let you push down firmly on an orange to get all the juice out.

The juice extractor has a fairly narrow feed tube so you'll need to chop apples and pears into quarters. Push them down the feed tube and the juice pours out almost immediately; the grater shreds the fruit finely and centrifugal force pushes the pulp up against the fine mesh at the side, straining the juice into the bowl. It copes well with fibrous produce such as pineapple, melon or even ginger, and it filters out pips, stalks, skin and seeds. The weight of the motor stops the juicer moving around unless the basket gets really full, and the speed of the motor presses the juice out of the fruit, leaving you with fairly dry pulp to scoop out.

Cleaning is the tedious part with any juicer and you do need to scoop out the pulp before it dries on, but the spatula fits perfectly into the basket so you can get the worst out very quickly. All the removable parts are dishwasher safe if the pulp does get stuck on; even the spout comes out of the bowl if you need to clean it so you're ready to get juicing again quickly. --Mary Branscombe

This centrifuagal juicer works differently from virtually all of its peers (rather like an accessory juicer on food processors). Most juicers hurl pith and skin over the top of a sloping filter into a basket. The Magimix keeps everything within its vertical overhanging walls. The positive result: less to clean and clearer thinner juice. The negative result is that although juice is longer lasting and doesn't seperate into layers of sewer-like sludge, the juice is less tasty and the machine becomes unstable if you try to juice too much at a time.

The sieve/grater is heavy and well made, although it really should have been redesigned to come apart for cleaning - as it is difficult to remove detritus from the overhanging assembly. The motor is reasonably quiet although not nearly as quiet as other induction rivals although it appears to have much torque and doesn't slow under load. Unfortunately, the filter/sieve assembly is not dynamically balanced - resulting in unecessary noise and uneveness even when empty. The feeder is primitively narrow and pathetically constricted for a machine at this price level, making it necessary to cut fruit etc into small segments. The absence of a feeder hod is utterly unforgivable in a machine at this price level.

The citrus press performs well, although having to turn the motor on and off for each half of even the smallest fruit is just a pain. Higher and narrowing citrus press walls or a fruit grabber would allow continuous processing.

So there you are. Chose this model for thin and relatively clear juicing and gain clarity and longevity at the cost of taste and layered oxygenated sludge. There is no perfect centrifugal juicer at the moment. This one produces results which do not require separation or straining and perhaps last longer in the fridge. Yet, sadly, there is something missing! I'm not experienced with masticating juicers, which I gather are slower to use. Perhaps they might combine taste and texture better than the flawed centifuges currently on offer.

With the Magimix we win some and lose some - but all centrifugal juicers these days fail to produce acceptable results. The Le Duo at least is almost on its own in design terms, is relatively easy to clean, well guaranteed, and produces relatively clear juice which is a little too thin for enhanced taste and texture and you don't have to stir or chew your way through it.