"The Syndey Opera House set is amazing and provides great fun for AFOLs! My wife loves architecture and I have to admit that this set has blown me away as well. With 4 building instruction booklets which can be assembled in parallel, we decided that each of us builds the parts of 2 booklets in parallel. Building in parallel it took us approximately 3 hours to assemble the whole set. If built by a single person, its probably around 6-7 hours build time. The instructions are easy to follow. There are also a number of neat new building techniques included in this set, particularly in the foundation of the smaller white standalone shells at the back of the building. In terms of new LEGO pieces we have not seen elsewhere, there were also a couple new ones in this set. For example black technic pieces with a joint ball on a brick arm with 1 axle and one regular hole. This piece was used to anchor technic bricks with holes onto which the white shells got attached in bricks with ball sockets. Obviously, the construction of the white shells for the roof due their unusual form and angles provided the richest new building experience. Once the individual parts (2 for the foundation, the major shells for the roof, etc.) were built, putting them together was seamless. And the result breathtaking! Its amazing with how much precision the LEGO designers captured the geometry of the real Syndey Opera House in this set. We have it now on display in our living room."
"After months of waiting I finally got the Mindstorms EV3 last week. With my 2 sons I assembled the first robot Tracker together and got it moving within an hour. Downloading and installing the Mindstorms software for our MAC laptop was easy and a matter of minutes to get it going. The software is easy to use and we got the other bonus robots immediately from the LEGO website. With still over a dozen robots to chose from this set has weeks of play fun still ahead of us - not to mention the unlimited possibilities of creating robots on your own. Using the Tracker robot I could show my sons how to use the robot with a running program as well as by switching it to IR control quickly since its so intuitive to use.
There are only 2 things which were a little disappointment: The Mindstorm set was announced to have instructions for 5 robots included - but the box had only the instructions for the Tracker robot included. This is not a major problem because you can get the building instructions for the other ones (Gripper, etc.) from the Lego website. What would have been nice if the building instructions would have been part of the project files (not only the program itself) and if everything would have been a single download file.
All in all this set is amazing and offers given the amount of robots (15) out of the box the best price / performance of all lego sets."