Chas,
Not sure how much help I can be, but here's my experience. My husband and I bought a Starbucks Italia about 6 months ago and loved it. What joy it brought to our lives! Until the day the steam knob popped off and apparently it was unrepairable. I mourned as if a dear family member had died! Starbucks isn't making any more of those machines at this time, probably because the steam knob is coming off of all of them and Starbucks does full refunds for them. Joy to us, since that provided the funds to purchase our next machine, a Saeco V'spresso. In our search we found out that the Italia was actually a Saeco machine.
The Saeco V'spresso took us to a whole other level of coffee delight! The steam wand is ready instantaneously (or at least it seems that way. The panarello attachment actually does a pretty good job frothing, not quite as good as we did on our own with the Italia, but I'll take a little less foam if I don't have to stand there holding the steam cup the entire time! I wish the water tank held a little more water, but it's sufficient. The controls are super easy to use and the machine is incredible easy to clean. We were able to set our Italia to warm up and be waiting for us in the morning. The V'Spresso doesn't have that feature, but it only takes about a minute for the machine to be raring to go, so that's not an issue. My one and only complaint is that the grounds are coming out too wet when they're dumped into the dredge drawer. I came here today to see if I could find a solution to that. The coffee taste is incredible. We use Starbucks coffee and found we like it better than anything else out there, even the drinks prepared by the Starbucks cafes themselves, using the same coffee!
In my opinion, if you have $1,000 to spend on a machine, the V'Spresso is the way to go. As much coffee as we drink now, this machine will more than pay for itself in six months, tops.
Hope that helps, and good luck with your decision!
Kim
