This is now the third time in my life I've tried a home ice cream maker. Well, third time is the charm! This machine is AMAZING! The chocolate hazelnut gelato you see pictured above is made with skim milk and sweetened with allulose, making it low calorie while still completely delicious and creamy. How the machine gets skim milk so creamy I have no idea! It's even better if you use a little half and half. The pint I made tonight was 315 calories for the whole pint, and it has exactly what I want in it. I hate all other non-sugar sweeteners, and I prefer not to have tons of fat and sugar. Here are the advantages of the Creami over my discarded ice cream makers of the past: --it seems to be nearly fool proof. You won't always get a great result if you're just winging it, but you do generally end up with actual ice cream. In the other ice cream makers, if you got the proportions wrong, it would sometimes not really freeze or it would get icy. --It's so much easier to get the ice cream out and to clean! The ice cream maker I had with a compressor was such a pain--you had to get the ice cream out around the paddle, or dig the paddle out of the ice cream, and invariably you end up making a mess. The Creami pints are so much easier to deal with. Even the lid, which is a little more annoying, is pretty easy to clean once you know what to do. (Read the manual, even though you have to go online to get it--it's important to take out the rubber gasket and clean under it.) --It doesn't matter if you have leftovers that freeze hard as a rock. We never enjoyed eating ice cream from our other makers on the next day, because they always hardened so much in the freezer. (And you had to make so much we always had leftovers.) With the Creami, if the leftovers freeze hard, you can just process them again and have just as good an experience the next day. The only real downsides I can see are 1) you have to wait 24 hours for your pint to freeze before you can make it into ice cream, and 2) the horrendous noise the machine makes. It's seriously loud, and the sound changes in alarming ways as the blade makes its way down and back up. The first few times I ran it, I was afraid something was going to break or blow up or something. I am now starting to get used to it and know the weird noises are normal. Dealing with the racket is totally worth it! If you've tried an ice cream maker before and decided it wasn't worth the hassle, give this one a try. It's wonderful!