Comment by vel0city
I don't have the fancier inverter style. Setting a power level still works pretty well even though flawed. Drawing out the overall cooking time still manages to get things more evenly heated in the end when you give the food time to distribute the heat throughout the food.
Cooking food for 2 minutes at 50% power gives a noticeable difference in average temperature compared to cooking food for 1 minute at 100% power and waiting a minute.
And I don't always know what it decides to do as far as turning the magnetron on and off on its sensor modes, but it'll spend a while doing automated reheat and potatoes and what not and it'll be dang near perfect every time.
Don't get me wrong I'd love an inverter microwave, truly a better option. But its not like the duty cycle process has no impact.
It's funny, because the inverter microwave is actually cheaper to build nowadays. It uses a small switching power supply to generate the needed voltage to run the magnetron at different power levels. The older style duty cycle microwaves use a huge transformer to generate the high voltage, which makes them way heavier and more expensive due to all that copper.