The one I got is the Instant Accu Slim Sous Vide Immersion Circulator (From the makers of the InstantPot). Serious Eats rated it the “Best affordable immersion circulator”. It’s pretty no-frills, with just a small control panel to set temperature and time, but it does its main job well. Serious Eats calls it a “no-frills immersion circulator that punches above its weight.” It sells for just $75 on Amazon.
Here’s a link to all their reviews:
All of the ‘features’ on a sous vide circulator beyond setting a temperature and time are pretty worthless, IMHO. It isn’t as if you can leave a piece of meat sitting in a room temperature bath for hours on end before starting the circulator, or that you need some precise set of different temperatures at particular times. Most of the current wand-style sous vide cookers now offer a smartphone app, and many are starting to require it to eliminate the user interface, but I honestly just prefer to use the basic interface and set a timer to check on it.
I did purchase an integrated Inkbird cooker for doing smaller (basically single portion) cooks because I thought it would be more convenient, and frankly found it to be disappointing in both quality and reliability (front panel came apart and had to be glued back together, has difficulty maintaining temperature, sometimes shuts off without warning). A decent quality wand-style circulator in a sufficiently deep pot, along with some silicone bags and weights or magnets to keep the food submerged is really all you need to get started.
Stranger
I had my eye on an InkBird model for a while because it had a lot of positive reviews Amazon, until I saw the Serious Eats review I posted earlier rated it poorly. Now I feel all those reviews on Amazon are probably suspect.
Yeah, I found it to be disappointing; Also, the body of the tank is aluminum but the shaped frame they provide to hold down food is stainless steel, so you quickly start to see oxidation of the aluminum due to dissimilar metals contact which indicates poor design choices and concern about aluminum leeching into food if you get a slight leak. After the third time it spontaneously shut down on me I just dumped it. I have had zero problems with the couple of Anova wand-style circulators other than connectivity issues to their iPhone app that I don’t really need anyway.
Stranger