Amazon.com has Men's Panasonic Arc5 Electric Wet/Dry Razor (ES-LV65-S) on sale. Note: this model doesn't include the cleaning base.
Lowest price ever according to Camelcamelcamel.
One per customer.
CamelCamelCamel.
I have an older Panasonic and the cleaning/charging base is nice to have but not critical. I clean the blades with a brush after every use and dunk the foils and blades in hot soapy water once every few months. Only use it dry after showering and applying a bit of talcum powder to my face.
Thanks for the tip!
I have been using Panasonic foil shavers for the past 10years. Last year I bought a Philips rotary shaver and I found it is not as good as a foil shaver. It takes longer to shave and leaves hair in many places. Now I am using my old Panasonic. But occasionally, when the hair is long (lazy to shave every day), I use the Philips to do the initial trimming and the use Panasonic to finish.
I wash my shavers under the tap. I found no need for a cleaning base.
Ah good to know that it might work better then, thanks! I wonder if it's got anything to do with actual hair thickness? I'd class my beard as medium density but each individual hair is quite thick. Maybe that factors into it somehow?
Cleaning base is more for the lazy and money down the drain if you wish. I got the base and you have to buy cleaning solution. Well, it smells nice, but all it does is you put the solution in the base, turn the shaver upside down and it turns the shaver on and off 'cleaning' it. nothing that the good old tap can't do, bar the smell.
TL;DR save yourself money and just clean under tap or brush.
Good to know ol soapy water will do the trick. Yeah the last thing I'd wanna do is get sucked into buying the solution just to use the base
I didn't. It was a present :)
There's a whole thread on whirlpool on shavers and generally people are saying Panasonic is the way to go, but ymmv. Go to Shavershop an try it there, just make sure the one who used it before didn't use it on his/her nether parts :P
Good to hear, I'd use it too if I got it as a gift. I suppose it's also good to hear that it's not completely necessary. Honestly if most people here recommend it and there's a whirlpool thread then that's good enough for me. The sensotouch I have doesn't work well and gillette cartridges just give me razorburn so the Panasonic certainly can't do worse :P
I have the same problem but with the shaver on this offer.
Cleaning base is not important.
Foil works much better. I get a very smooth shave. It's also fairly quiet.
Great deal. On many sides.
I think that's the model I have. I paid $250 local for it. It's very good and I want to buy another, but don't want a US adapter.
I've had several similar Panasonic shavers in the past but with 3 or 4 blades. Yes it shaves great for a few months, however every one of them had blades that became blunt after 5 or 6 months and needed replacing. I think at the time, Panasonic recommended replacing them every 2 years!
I contacted them about the crappy blades but of course I just got back some generic email which said nothing.
Unless they've significantly improved the quality of their blades, I wouldn't be buying one.
And the blade plugs foil cost as much as this whole discount unit.
~60% of the cost of the whole unit on Amazon. Still expensive though.
Same thing happened with my Philips shaver. Blades are rated up to 2 years, replaced them 5 months in. $100 for the replacement. Guessing they rate them based on weekly shaves?
I am now shaving with Gillette razor. Fast and cheap. Each blade lasts 6 month if you take care of it properly. My hair is thick and strong.
![Men's Panasonic Arc5 Electric Wet/Dry Razor ~$141.50 AU incl. Shipping ($109 USD) [RRP $199.99 USD] @ Amazon US](https://files.ozbargain.com.au/n/60/340760.jpg?h=09ed3c9d)
Pretty decent price and has good reviews. I bought this a while back when it was cheap on Amazon too, but for whatever reason it didn't work well for me and took aaaages to shave. It just wouldn't catch all the hairs properly leaving me with about 20% that I had to arduously trim down using the inbuilt trimmer. Any idea if a foil might work better if a rotary didn't do the job for me?
Also is the cleaning base very important or is the shaver easy enough to clean some other way?