La Marzocco just announced a new home espresso machine, the Linea Mini. The MSRP of the Mini is, roughly speaking, $4,500. I'm sure $4,500 is affordable to someone but I feel safe to say that it's not affordable to most people. I don't begrudge La Marzocco-- they think there's a niche at that price-point that they can exploit so they're going at it. More power to them. The problem for me is that there is another niche that nobody wants to exploit at the opposite end of the spectrum: the low cost entry level machine.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

To be sure, such machines exist. At the very low end, they exist only to be mocked and vilified-- "steam toys" that are not even capable of producing true espresso as we know it and that rely on sketchy gimmicks like pressurized portafilters.

Rising up from the bottom of the barrel, a gaggle of Gaggias make their home, until they, in their turn, give way to the widow maker, the Rancilio Sylvia, old and withered but still formidably marketed and priced to match. Sprinkled amongst the Gaggias and Sylvia are some superautomatic machines which I won't discuss except to say that they exist.

The Crossland CC1, young, unheralded, ambitious, inhabits a weird gray zone in the upper atmosphere of this low-price kingdom: it's too expensive for an average, uncommitted neophyte but it lacks a few key factors to compete further up in the more rarified atmospheres.

I've sketched out this attempted-murderer's row of budget machines to show just how much room there is for someone-- anyone!-- to come in and shake things up-- try something new, different, and affordable.

The Gaggias and Sylvia are old designs, maybe with a minor tweak here or there thrown in over the years, all use the same technology, and all very fiddly to use, and frustratingly flawed. The CC1 is better but, by the time you've thrown in a decent espresso grinder (a subject for another day!), you're already pushing into a $1,000 investment. For starter equipment.

Unfortunately, right now there's no other way-- buy a Gaggia or Sylvia along with a truck-load of caveats, spend upwards of $1,000, or bust. I won't mention the once promising Kickstarter-backed project the crashed and burned horribly. It never made it out of the lab except for a few malfunction-prone prototypes so, as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't exist. There are pod machines that aren't espresso at all, even if they claim to be, and super-automatic machines which, at this price-point, have almost as many caveats as the Gaggia and Sylvia though they've got the advantage of built-in grinders, for whatever that's worth.

Bottom line, the low-end landscape looks to me unnecessarily bleak. I appreciate La Marzocco hunting for the whales of the home espresso market but the guppies and minnows have money to spend too and, while they don't have as much to spend individually as the whales, there are a lot more of them in the shallows than there are giants lurking in the depths. I just wish there was something more hopeful in the marketplace for them to buy, something that didn't foment discouragement or create an artificially high barrier to entry. The answer has got to be out there, but is anybody looking?