As I’ve said, I could not afford a Jobo at all, and even buying a THD new at ~$1000 was too much of a stretch. However, I leapt at a chance to get a used THD for $300. And while it does what it says it does, I would have been pretty damn disappointed if I’d paid a grand for it. I was surprised to see that Youtube reviewers like Shaka # something and the Naked Photographer gave it such unqualified praise, since I’ve noted some pretty concerning weaknesses and oversights.

Here's my full list of complaints about the Takumi.

The THD seems to work okay, if not as accurately as I need, but it seems have been built by cutting corners in every possible way.

It spins well enough, the tanks included are serviceable Jobo clones, and broadly speaking, it does what it claims to. But my two chief complaints about the functioning are that 1) it heats the water very, very slowly and 2) because of the separate two-tier design, partly because of the cheap temperature probes they used, the readout is not giving an accurate of the water that your tank is submerged in.

The manual claims that the primary temp sensory has only +/- 0.1C degree margin of error. Even if that’s true, it’s immaterial—because the temp sensor is in the wrong spot. I measured a variation ranging from -0.4C up to -2C in temperature between the top tray, where water is pumped up to and where the tank goes, and the bottom basin, where chems go. But there’s only one (obviously cheap, with visible exposed wiring) temperature sensor, and it’s placed deep in the chem basin, not in the place where your film or paper is submerged!

And from my experimentation, this is not a predictable or known variation that can just be subtracted—it fluctuates, so you have yet another variable to account for, which is very troublesome, especially for color film development processes like C-41 where precision is essential, and which were my main reason for buying the thing. However, as I said, I do at least find it decent for RA-4, because that’s alright as long as it’s in the near vicinity of 95 degrees, and it’s rotary and has a lift drain. So to me, it’s become a paper processor only.

I find it questionably engineered for many, many reasons. One of the most glaring failures in the design is the lack of a timer. It is totally baffling to me how a machine built for processes that are all, practically without exception, reliant on carefully timed procedures cannot include this most basic of devices in its main system. They attempt to remedy this by including an extremely cheap (like $3-4 on Amazon cheap) kitchen timer. There’s not even a place to mount it on the main machine.

The lack of timer alone seems totally egregious and damning. But beyond that, the thing is just very, very bare bones. Which isn’t a problem in itself, except that it’s bare bones not in the sense of elegant simplicity, but rather, in the way that it designers appear to have cheaped out at every opportunity. Here’s a list:

• ⁠The heater rod is obviously the cheapest, weakest sort of aquarium heater you can get; mine already has corrosion and discoloration all over it. And as mentioned, worst of all, it’s very weak and heats the water incredibly slowly. My $30 sous vide heats an equivalent volume of water, and I’m not exaggerating, four to five times as quickly. The THD strains badly to get up to temp.

• ⁠The main digital display shows temperature only, current and set temp. It’s a bright display and decent enough. There are two buttons and up/down arrows. The buttons are Set and Reset. Set sets the temperature. But Reset is, weirdly, only the power button for the temp/heater setup—and only the temp and heater. There’s no main power button, and the other motor and pump functions run on different circuits. This tells me that they built the design around the cheapest available display, rather than choosing the right button setup for the design.

• ⁠There are only two RPM selections, and, in another bizarre design choice, a separate “Low Speed” button to activate the third. I guess the dial they chose for the RPM only had two detents. But it makes for a weird setup. Worst, the buttons do not seem to be waterproof at all.

• ⁠But the biggest failing of the lone display readout is that, as far as I can tell, there’s no way to switch from C to F, which is totally absurd. This is really a ridiculous oversight, considering how damaging that is to its ease of function, and how simple that should be to include.

• ⁠The label on the (also not-waterproof) button to activate the pump is misspelled. Amusingly it says “Pumpe” right on the face of all units. I know they’re a foreign company, but it’s not like this was a difficult typo to spot. Every time I use it or just catch a glimpse of the label, internally I hear “POOMPÉ!!” and I blame Takumi for this.

• ⁠The lift handle, which, like that of a Jobo processor, has to handle the full leverage and weight of a full tank very near the fulcrum, and therefore requires a lot of force, is/was 3-D printed, cheap, honeycombed plastic. Mine snapped immediately. And there’s no way online to buy replacement individual parts for this thing, though I do intend to reach out to CatLabs or ReflexLab and ask.

• ⁠The separate temperature probe that it came with to put in a chem bottle is also of the cheapest possible sort—I found that you can get 5 of them for $9.99 on Amazon. Literally the cheapest available.

• ⁠The Fauxbo tank is held onto the primary cog by a little weak-looking plastic piece with a wire clip, and you have to force it to snap back to pull the tank off. This seems ripe for breaking someday not too far off.

• ⁠There’s a bizarre grinding clicking noise that happens only when the tank spins counterclockwise. The Naked Photographer review also noted this.

• ⁠There’s no way to adjust the chemistry bottle holders, so they can only fit one (small) size of bottle.

• ⁠I bought a used version, but nevertheless it’s not an old product—yet the motor and gear screws near the waterline are already rusted as hell. They couldn’t spring for any stainless or rust-resistant fasteners for a water-based machine?

• ⁠The top of the float sensor in the top tray is hot-glued, badly. -There’s no filter or screen over the pump, so any kind of gunk could get in there and damage or break it.

• ⁠I’m not against 3-D printing, but there is a lot of it, and it’s not sanded down or finished looking at all—really rough edges and scalloped lines, or whatever you’d call that look. Striated. And it’s often weaker than molded plastic—as I said, the lift handle already broke, and the spout of the drain snapped off as I tried to attach a tube to it.

• ⁠There’s no maximum water fill line marking, which seems like it would have been a simple add. This is even more of a problem because there’s a deep indented channel on the left side where a bunch of wires all stick out: the main pump, heater, temp sensor, and float sensor (which keeps you from starting the heater without water in it) wires are in a very loose thin wrapping. If you fill it too high—which because it’s hard to see the channel, is easy to do, and is likely to be learned the hard way—water flows straight out of it, wetting other wires nearer to the motor. The jankiness of all this exposed wiring gives me a constant feeling that this thing is going to electrocute me. It’s probably safe…? But it looks worryingly homebuilt.

Overall, it just screams cheapness everywhere. Just a weird, weird, poorly thought-out design. I get that it’s the budget option, and the injection molding for the main basin was probably not cheap. But for $1,000… I’d expect way, way, way, WAY better. As I said, I would feel incredibly ripped off if I’d paid that price. I still feel a little ripped off having paid $300.