Maytag MEDB755DW dryer review: Modern touches conceal an outdated design

If you're in the market for a midrange dryer, Maytag's $849 MEDB755DW sounds tempting. For not much more than a budget machine this appliance offers quite a bit. It has numerous cycle options and steam modes. It also hustles through its laundry loads quickly.

6.8

Maytag MEDB755DW dryer

The Good

The Maytag MEDB755DW dryer runs quickly. It comes with multiple cycles and steam functions at a reasonable price.

The Bad

It’s made from parts that feel flimsy and its controls are confusing. Its drum is relatively small.

The Bottom Line

Pass on this Maytag dryer for one that's less expensive, faster or better designed.

Unfortunately the dryer suffers from shortcomings that are hard to forgive at any price. First, its controls are confusing and a pain to use. Second, the appliance's chassis feels cheap and dated despite its modern LEDs and brushed metal highlights. You're better off buying the $649 Samsung DV7750 budget dryer instead. It's less expensive, runs faster, is easier on the eyes and a breeze to operate.  

Just a bit more than basic

With a control panel on its top back edge, the Maytag MEDB755DW is designed to match top-load washing machines . This tired design has been around for ages. Today products styled like this tend to be budget or otherwise no-frills appliances . Two perfect examples are the $600 Kenmore 65132 and GE GTD45EASJWS dryers , both as basic as it gets.

Front-load washers and their dryer counterparts, on the other hand, typically cost extra. Companies also like to reserve their most advanced laundry features for these units. They're more flexible too, since you can usually stack them vertically or set them on slick pedestal accessories.

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Maytag does try to elevate the MEDB755DW dryer beyond a barebones machine. For instance, the appliance's control panel is wide and completely flat. Even though it's plastic, the panel's backsplash also mimics the look of sleek brushed steel.

All buttons on the panel sit flush with its surface too and are entirely touch sensitive. The only true physical control is a large dial at the panel's center. Various LEDs shine brightly to indicate settings and cycles you've selected.

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All this gives the dryer a more contemporary appearance. Unfortunately that's ruined by a rickety lint filter. Long and flexible, the metal mesh filter sits inside a cavity on the appliance's top left side. It's the kind of filter you usually see on old machines or new dryers with rock-bottom prices. The Kenmore 65132 dryer has a lint trap just like it.

I found the control panel a pain to use as well. Since it's entirely flat, tiny text and small LED lights are all you have to guide your fingers where to press. Everything is close together and jumbled too, which makes it even trickier to interpret what's happening. I vastly prefer the Samsung DV7750 dryer 's controls. Its keys are well spaced and easy to identify. Stenciled lines around the cycle dial clearly connect labels to their corresponding LED indicator too.

The dryer offers a total of nine separate cycle programs. They're designed to handle a range of items. Cycles include heavy duty, bedding, delicates and normal. The machine has a few steam modes too, most notably, the steam refresh cycle, which hits fabric inside the drum with water vapor and heat to lessen creases.

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The drum itself is only 7 cubic feet in capacity. While that's typical for budget dryers, it's cramped compared with the 8- and even 9-cubic-foot capacity pricier appliances provide. Even the 7.4-cubic-foot $649 Samsung DV7550 offers a few more inches of drum space. For bigger loads you'll have to spend hundreds of dollars more on a bigger unit. Examples include the $1,099 Electrolux EFME617S Perfect Steam (8 cubic feet) and the $1,100 Kenmore 69133 (8.8 cubic feet).

Unlike the GE GTD75ECSLWS dryer that comes with sophisticated, connected home abilities, this Maytag appliance is not smart. It's true smart features tend to live in pricey flagship laundry machines. That made it all the more refreshing to see support for Alexa and the Google Assistant, plus mobile app controls on GE's midrange dryer.   

Agile enough to run speedy cycles

The Maytag MEDB755DW may be an ancient dryer design dressed up with modern touches. Regardless, this machine dries loads of laundry in hurry. While not the swiftest clothes dryer I've laid my hands on, it qualifies within the fastest top third.

We construct our tests to measure how much water a dryer can pull from loads of sample fabric over time. We also eliminate as many variables as we can during our testing. These include environmental conditions and test materials. I tested the Maytag dryer on the machine's Normal cycle. The manual states the cycle is for "work clothes, casual wear, mixed cottons, corduroys." I used the dryer's medium temperature setting.

The Maytag MEDB755DW took an average of just 41 minutes to zip through its cycles. That's speedy, but no match for the current dryer speed champ, the $649 Samsung DV7750 (37 minutes). Neither can it catch the more expensive $1,300 Kenmore 69133 (38 minutes). The Maytag dryer's showing is on par with the $600 Kenmore 65132 (41 minutes). Bringing up the rear in our group of top-load-style dryers is the $799 GE GTD75ECSLWS, which needed 48 minutes to complete its loads.

The water evaporation rate describes a dryer's raw moisture destroying power. Essentially, it's the average weight of water a dryer can remove from wet fabric over time. The Maytag dryer notched a respectable average of 0.13 pounds per minute, currently the sixth highest score to date. Understandably the Samsung DV7750 sits at the top (0.143 pounds per minute).

In terms of power, the closest top-load-style dryer to the Samsung we've tested is the Kenmore 69133 (0.139 pounds per minute). That's followed by the basic Kenmore 65132 model (0.133 pounds per minute). The GE GTD75ECSLWS dryer (0.114 pounds per minute) sits near the bottom despite boasting a bevy of smart, connected home abilities.

Design is this dryer's dealbreaker

The $849 Maytag MEDB755DW dryer certainly sounds like a sweet deal. For its reasonable price it dries fast and has numerous cycle options and steam modes. Unfortunately this Maytag appliance is saddled with a control panel that's way too frustrating to use. The machine's archaic lint filter is also a dinosaur that should have gone extinct decades ago.

There are simply much better bargains out there. The $649 Samsung DV7750, for one, packs the most power of any clothes dryer we've taken for a spin to date. Samsung's appliance also looks nicer, has controls that are simple to operate and feels durable. All this makes it the superior midrange dryer choice.