Breville juicers are priced much higher than the Juiceman. Don't you usually get what you pay for? Usually, yes. But not this time: Breville Juicers waste a lot of juice because of an inferior mesh filter design.

Before deciding if a cheaper juicer is actually better, let's look closer at the Breville "Juice Fountain Elite"...

How does the Breville make less juice? The "mesh filter" element in Breville juicers are designed to produce pulp-free juice. In order to get that smooth, watery juice, that many people like, a lot of juice is thrown out with the pulp.

Breville makes their mesh filters with what looks basically like a plain wire-screen simliar to what's used on home windows. Have a close look at the mesh at the link below. It's frayed at the top and sides where the spot-welds don't seamlessly bind it to the steel ring frame.

This makes the filter very hard to clean. That's big thumbs down for any juicer, no matter the price.

I happen to be a mechanical engineer, and this mesh filter looks like it's designed to fail. That's not surprising since a replacement filter costs over $60. That's the same price as the entire Juiceman JM300 unit.

How it works is, this mesh is so fine that it only allows the free-flowing juice through and pushes about 20% of the juice out with the pulp instead of squeezing it into your glass.

You will know when you finish juicing and go to empty the waste container: don't just throw out the pulp - grab a handful of the stuff and feel how wet it is. The Breville juicer has lost about 20% of your juice.

This ultra-fine mesh makes juice from the Breville Elite have very little pulp in it. This pulp is the plant's fiber.

A "no pulp" juice might suit your taste buds, but did you know there's a synergistic benefit between juice and the broken-up fiber of vegetables that the human stomach doesn't do well at breaking down to metabolize on its own? Unless we chew each bite for 20 minutes...

This is a very big deal for juicing. Let's look into this more, in my article, "What kind of juice is good for you?"

All Breville juicers use this design of mesh filter. You might like juice without pulp, but it's no where near as healthy as the pulpy alternative, and Breville juicers will pour out a lot of your money to get that pulp-free juice.

The mesh filter in the Juiceman JM400 and JM300 (see pics at the links below) is built to last. It's made of tough and glossy-smooth sheet-metal that squeezes far more juice out of your produce, and is pretty much indestructible.

Juiceman juicers leave a lot of small pulp particles in the juice. This is why you get more juice with Juiceman machines, and you can verify this by feeling how dry the pulp is compared to a Breville juicer.

My last Juiceman had a similar "mesh filter" design and never failed, after 6 years, and I just moved on to the newer model, the JM300, because it's so much easier to clean, has a more powerful motor, and a 3-inch wide mouth so I can just drop in apples, carrots, lemons, etc. with little or no cutting -- a giant leap forward!

So yeah, juicing vegetables with a little fruit and a lemon or two thrown in to improve taste, is a healthy thing to do. But I think it's good to see juicing is just another way of eating more vegetables than you'd get otherwise.

Rather than pouring money into a popular juicer, get something like the Juiceman, and use the rest of that cash for high-quality, organic vegetables.