Omega VRT350 Juicer over Breville, lettuce over carrots

Omega VRT350

After a year of debating if it made sense to purchase a juicer and as my love of Blue Print Cleanse's Green Juice (at $10 a pop) grew, I decided to buy an Omega VRT350 Juicer.

I posted "What juicer should I buy?" on Facebook and 2 teams quickly emerged: Team Breville (centrifugal juicers) and Team Omega (masticating juicers). After reading tons of reviews and speaking to my friends/relatives here's the recap:

Team Breville: Juices 2-3x faster (65,000 - 125,000 RPM), $100 cheaper, awesome for fruit based juice, can handle leafy greens but you need to ball them up, wastes more pulp, fast speed causes the juice to oxidize (not a problem if you drink the juice right away, but not good it you want to refrigerate leftover).

Team Omega: Much slower but also much quieter, gets more juice out (less and drier pulp), more expensive but longer warranty, handles leafy greens better, slow speed (80 RPM) means no oxidation allowing juice to be stored for up to 72 hours without degradation.

My husband and I decided we prefer quality juice over speed. The first juice we made I went a little kale crazy and ended up with bitter tasting juice. Note to self: do not put more kale then carrot & celery. The second time I learned my lesson and made a delicious lettuce-kale-apple blend (1 head of lettuce, 1/2 bunch of kale, 2 golden apples). The whole process (set-up, juicing and cleaning) takes about 20 minutes and makes 20oz. Next time I'll probably double the ingredients to have some for storage. I also learned that carrots produce tons of pulp/waste whereas lettuce is extremely efficient for a base.

the Omega VRT350 makes 24 oz with little waste