Toshiba EM925A5A Review

If you don't have room for many appliances in your kitchen, the Toshiba EM925A5A may be an attractive option, as it's on the smaller side.

Performance Comparison

Likes

This product gave its relatively best set of results with the Hot Pocket and the small frozen burrito in our prepared frozen foods metric. It did an impeccable job heating the burrito, with the left, right, and center areas only varying by an average difference of 1°F and all three measurements were well above the requisite serving temperature listed by the package.

This microwave did equally well with the Hot Pocket, though our judges noticed that the right side was slightly crispier than the left. Unfortunately, that about sums it up for overall top-tier performances when it comes to this product. It did well in other tests but never really placed at the top.

The Toshiba EM925A5A heated our control volume of water fairly quickly in our time trial speed test, increasing the temperature almost 90°F after being heated for 45 seconds. It also performed decently in our leftovers assessment, though the breakfast sausages were significantly hotter than the green beans or potatoes.

It effectively heated the canned soup to the proper serving temperature upon following the reheating directions. In addition, we like that the Toshiba EM925A5A has all the typical convenience features, like one-touch buttons and an auto-start +30 seconds button.

It has decent lighting, doesn't easily slide around on a countertop, and the popcorn preset performed fairly well in our tests. Most of the kernels were popped and none were burnt, though a few areas were a little overcooked.

Dislikes

Regrettably, we found that the Toshiba EM925A5A doesn't seem to heat up all that evenly, at least based on our heat map test. There were very distinctive patterns burned into the marshmallow fluff; some areas were completely uncooked while other sections were fully blackened.

We were also not impressed with how this microwave heated up pizza. The crusts and centers remained cool while the rest of the pizza was piping hot. It delivered similar results with the single-serving frozen lasagna, with the right side remaining much cooler than the left or center.

However, it was in our defrosting metric where we found the performance of the EM925A5A to be the most disappointing. This product not only failed to defrost the majority of the pound of ground turkey we placed in it, but it also cooked a small section. We scraped less than 7 ounces off the block after the defrosting cycle, with the reminder still far too frozen to break apart.

Should You Buy the Toshiba EM925A5A?

Though this product failed to earn any of our awards, it still shined in several aspects, notably in reheating leftovers and heating frozen convenience foods. If those tasks are mainly what you use a microwave for, this will be a decent product at a decent price. It also has a small footprint, although it's not the most compact option out there. If you use your microwave to regularly defrost meat, however, we'd suggest looking at some other top-ranked microwaves.

What Other Microwaves Should You Consider?

The Toshiba EM925A5A is a fairly ordinary microwave, but it is affordable. If you want something a bit more well-rounded, we'd point you toward the high-scoring Toshiba EM131A5C, which carries the defrosting power that the EM925A5A lacks.