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  • Introduction

  • Design & Usability

  • Features

  • Performance

  • Conclusion

  • Science Introduction

  • Cleaning Performance

  • Efficiency

  • Capacity

  • Introduction
  • Design & Usability
  • Features
  • Performance
  • Conclusion
  • Science Introduction
  • Cleaning Performance
  • Efficiency
  • Capacity

Introduction

You may elect to hire a less erratic worker to clean your dishes. Its $949 MSRP is frequently discounted to around $800, and for that price, you can buy slightly quicker dishwashers that are a bit more consistent.

Design & Usability

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A unique hybrid control panel and room for lots of dishes

The upper rack can be removed and the upper wash arm replaced with an included spray for washing very large items.

Though dishwashers that hide their controls are slightly less user-friendly, they remain popular. That's because front controls, though more accessible, interrupt the unified look of a dishwasher's front panel. The Samsung DMT800RHS has a control panel with a display that spills over onto the front of the machine, offering all the inconvenience of hidden controls with all the visual dissonance of a glossy black island in the middle of a sea of stainless. We think it's an unfortunate choice.

Drop the door and things are a little more traditional, with room for 11 place settings. If required, the upper rack can be removed and the upper wash arm replaced with an included spray for washing very large items—a pretty unique feature.

{{photo_gallery "Front Closed Photo", "Fingerprints Photo", "Controls 1 Photo", "Controls 2 Photo", "Front Open Photo", "Interior Detail Photo", "Top Rack Photo", "Top Rack Detail Photo 1", "Top Rack Detail Photo 2", "Top Rack Detail Photo 3", "Bottom Rack Photo", "Bottom Rack Detail Photo 2", "Bottom Rack Detail Photo 3", "Cutlery Basket Photo", "Cutlery Basket Detail Photo 1", "Cutlery Basket Detail Photo 2", "Cutlery Basket Detail Photo 3"}}

Features

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Lots of cycles, but few features

There are no real customization features on this dishwasher: you can’t change the wash level or other options except by choosing a different wash cycle or one of the other features.

There are no real customization features on this dishwasher.

Luckily, the six wash cycles on offer provide a good range of options from quick cycles for small, lightly soiled loads up to large, heavily soiled loads and pots and pans. There are a handful of other wash options, including a sanitize mode, start delay and a half wash for a small load that uses less water and electricity.

Performance

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If you're willing to wait—and pay—for the best results, you'll find this machine is an effective performer.

The Samsung DMT800RHS offers a wide range of cycles with very different speeds, from the just-over-an-hour Quick+ to the nearly three hours of the Pots & Pans cycle. Overall, we found excellent performance from this dishwasher, with most of the cycles more or less effectively removing the food stains from our test dishes. Stains rarely migrated from dirty dishes to clean ones, though some of the most stubborn, baked-on food particles remained behind.

This Samsung is a quiet dishwasher.

Not surprisingly, the longest cycles performed the best, with the Pots & Pans cycle getting dirty dishes the cleanest. This Samsung is a quiet dishwasher, though, so it's likely you won't even notice how long it takes.

For an average user, this dishwasher would cost about $38.09 a year to run, which is a few dollars higher than similar models we have looked at. If your water and energy costs are high, this could be a deal-breaker.

Conclusion

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The Samsung DMT800RHS is a perfectly adequate dishwasher for an attractive price.

If you're not thrown by its half-hidden control panel, you may want to consider the Samsung DMT800RHS. Though it takes its time to get the job done, and though it isn't the most efficient machine we've tested, we were pleased with its performance in our tests.

About the only serious issue with this dishwasher is the stiff competition in the $800-$1,000 price range. There's no real compelling reason to buy this Samsung if other washers out there get dishes even marginally cleaner for the same price.

Science Introduction

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All of the dishwashers we test get the same treatment: a standardized set of dirty plates with the same exact stains, plus water and energy monitoring. The Samsung DMT800RHS did well on cleaning, but took a long time and used a lot of energy.

Cleaning Performance

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The longer you wait, the cleaner your dishes will be.

The Quick+ cycle on the Samsung DMT800RHS took just over an hour to run, and we found that it offered moderate cleaning performance, but it failed to remove some of our more persistent stains. It removed most of the egg and oatmeal from our dishes, but failed to shift some of the tea and meat stains, leaving significant traces of both. It also made little impact on the lipstick that we put on the rim of our test teacups, so we would recommend that you use it for lightly soiled dishes only.

The Normal cycle is the one that gets the most use on dishwashers, as it is designed for mixed loads of dishes. We found it effective, shifting the majority of our test stains on our dishes and cutlery. It did struggle with some of the stains, though, leaving traces of the baked-on spinach on one dish and the burnt milk on one of our test glasses. It also didn’t remove the lipstick on the cup rims. But overall, the performance was very successful.

The ultimate test of a dishwasher is how well it can remove heavily baked on, burnt stains from cookware. We test this by adding a number of serving dishes covered in burnt and dried cheese, sauce, pasts, and burnt sugar to our test load. The Samsung DMT800RHS did an excellent job here when we tested it using the Pots & Pans cycle with the "Storm Wash" secondary spray arm enabled. It removed all of the test stains on our dishes, with the exception of one tiny spot of burnt sugar and a couple of small spots of spinach on the dishes. The overall performance was extremely successful.

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Efficiency

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On the most effective cycles, this Samsung used a great deal of water and electricity.

This dishwasher used a fairly minimal amount of water in the standard cycles, but that was not the case for its special cycles, such as the 9.48 gallons used for Heavy Duty. For this reason, you should only use the longer, more powerful cycles when they are actually needed.

We found that the Samsung DMT800RHS used a low amount of electricity in the Normal and Quick+ wash modes, but it used a lot more in the Heavy Duty and Pots & Pans modes, because it is heating the water using electricity.

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Capacity

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Meet the tester

Richard Baguley

Richard Baguley

Contributor

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Richard Baguley is a veteran writer who has written about technology ranging from Alphabet to Zip file utilities. He has contributed to pretty much every major tech publication, including Amiga Format Magazine, PC World, Wired, CNET, Toms Guide, Forbes, and many others. He lives in the Boston metro area with his wife, dog, and an indeterminate number of cats.

See all of Richard Baguley's reviews

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