Pro: price, acceptable cup from supermarket coffee, particularly those with Robusta blend Con: not for coffee enthusiast out of the box, just okay cup with some mod
CM618C makes coffee as advertised but do not expect it to last into decades.
I found it fits perfectly with commercially available/supermarket coffee like Folger, Maxwell House and the like, making a 鈥渟mooth鈥 coffee that is big on body from pre-ground coffee bean, an acceptable cup of coffee in that way from supermarket brands, particularly blends that includes Robusta.
I did not have any spill over while brewing even I made coffee at its full capacity i.e. 16oz water and 30 grams of coffee ground. FYI, I kept the coffee ground well below half the capacity of its brew chamber.
I do not like coffee made with the enclosed permanent coffee filter. The resulting coffee has too many sediments which will be even more bitter the longer it sits. I used basket type 鈥渃up cake鈥 coffee filter from Melitta (Melitta 629450 Small Basket Coffee Filters for 2-5 cup coffeemakers, Green) for almost all of my coffee making and it worked much better that way. I used the enclosed permanent filter as a 鈥渢amper鈥 to fit Melitta cup cake filter into its brewing chamber. If you would like to pursue the paper filter way, I believe that the Kalita Wave 185 filter is much smaller and could be a better fit though at a price.
From my experience, the machine does not make any acceptable coffee from Starbucks, pre-ground or whole bean, and most specialty coffee out of the box. Coffee brewed from these beans are, at times, very bitter, not tasty enough and lack nuance, likely due to 1) its shower head design that concentrates hot water mostly in the center and results in a big body/much less detail in the cup and 2) slow brew cycle which increases extraction, around 2:30 minutes for 15 grams/3 tablespoon of coffee and 1 cup of water 鈥 1:16 ratio, exacerbating the bitterness and 鈥渇lat鈥 cup profile of coffee.
Further modification in brewing technics improves the cup quality significantly but still cannot match coffee offered at specialty caf茅 and 鈥渘o press鈥 French press brewing introduced by coffee gurus like Hoffmann and Baca in term of nuance and clarity. My mod includes the utilization of goose neck kettle, used in third wave caf茅, to both pre wet the coffee ground in circular/concentric pour before the machine starts and after the brew cycle finished, 40 ml each time in 7 seconds.