Jen WC

I am a big fan of the L&L kilns. I am not personally familiar with Evenheat, Jen-Ken, or Olympic, but from all the noise in the various pottery groups on the intertubes, most of the users of those brands appear not to be production users, and most of them seem to be happy enough with their kilns. I have worked with both Skutt and L&L in several community studios with a lot of volume, and much prefer the L&L. The Skutt PK models are designed for high production environments and are pretty sturdy kilns compared to their regular line, but you can get an equivalent level from L&L with their quad element option. If you want even firing, the L&L has zone control (multiple thermocouples) as standard; you will pay extra for it from Skutt. If you get zone control from Skutt, it will manage the separate zones independently as expected, but the 3 thermocouples cannot be calibrated separately (at least in those at one studio I work with that has Skutts), you get one thermocouple offset that applies to all 3 regardless of whether a particular zone is running hotter or cooler than the others. If you are going to do your own maintenance, the hard ceramic element holders in the L&L make element changes a breeze. The Skutt pins and channels in the soft brick are hateful. As for the SSRs, they seem to be an available option for only a few of the Skutt models, so do some more comparative research if that is priority for you. Regarding the Skutt touchscreen vs. the Genesis (which is now standard on L&L kilns, you will pay extra for the Skutt KMT versions of their kilns), you have the question backwards. Both are made by Bartlett, but the Skutt version is in different form factor to match the way they designed their control panel. The screens and features are mostly comparable, but Skutt does not offer much of a written user manual, instead they build an FAQ of sorts into a help menu behind a button on the screen. Further (which borders on criminal IMO), Skutt has removed the slow cool option from the cone-fire programming. If you wish to slow cool a firing, you must construct a custom ramp-hold program that mimics the desired cone-fire program and append additional segments for the slow cool. In addition to being inconvenient, you lose access to the adaptive capability of the cone-fire method. (With this feature, either controller will monitor the ramp rate in the final segment into the target cone and automatically modify the target temperature (e.g., lower the target temperature if the ramp is lagging due to worn elements) in accordance with an algorithm licensed from Orton. In a ramp-hold program, the target temperature is absolute as programmed, which means a slower ramp due to worn elements will result in an overfire.) The Genesis has an on-off checkbox in the settings for appending a slow cooling segment to a cone-fire program. The only feature Skutt offers over the standard Genesis is an extra cost subscription to a cloud data service into which the controller will automatically upload data from every firing for later retrieval and analysis. The Genesis only retains data for the last 10 firings. If you don't subscribe to the Skutt Kiln Link cloud service, their version also retains data for just the last 10 firings.
The foregoing is my opinion and should not be confused with what anybody else may think..
dw

Following. Great thread! 
But I keep lamenting my inability to buy an L&L here in Europe.
They now have a distributor in UK, but UK is not in EU anymore! >hits forehead with open palm<
Well, like I said, really good discussion!

Following. Great thread! 
But I keep lamenting my inability to buy an L&L here in Europe.
They now have a distributor in UK, but UK is not in EU anymore! >hits forehead with open palm<
Well, like I said, really good discussion!

Following. Great thread! 
But I keep lamenting my inability to buy an L&L here in Europe.
They now have a distributor in UK, but UK is not in EU anymore! >hits forehead with open palm<
Well, like I said, really good discussion!