I have the Toto Washlet and love it. It's set on a Gerber "Avalanche" which fits and works quite well. It has the soft close seat and is the oval style. Try it...you'll like it.

drbouba: "I am deciding between a "normal" toilet with a bidet lid (eg the Toto S300) or the Neorest 500. It seems like we should go with the neorest because it is a single device which will look better. However, I don't really like nor feel any need for the automatic lid open and closing nor the automatic flushing. Is there any other advantage?"

My initial response is that we have a friend who has owned a Neorest for a couple of years, and she loves hers. But I will temper that with the following two remarks.

The Neorest is an order of magnitude more complex than the toilet seat alone. Simply, here is much more that can go wrong, which is not saying that something will go wrong, merely that opportunities for failure compound with added complexity.

"Can anyone say which have better spray wands or drying action? I think it will be cheaper to go with the washlet but I'd buy the neorest if it will simply be a superior toilet over time."

There is a 27 degree difference between the Inax line of advanced toilet seats and the Toto advanced toilet seats. Inax, which invented the category, determined in its research that for the posterior cleansing function, the optimum angle at which the spray should contact the user is 70 degrees from horizontal or, to put it another way, 20 degrees from vertical. Extending the spray wand properly to deliver the stream of warm water at 70 degrees, however, the wand was not well placed for the feminine (bidet) function, so Inax toilet seats use a second, dedicated, wand for the bidet function.

Toto designed a single wand to perform both the posterior cleansing and bidet functions (from two independent nozzles in the same wand). That necessitated a compromise of the angle of the spray for posterior cleansing. The Toto posterior spray hits the user at an angle of 43 degrees from horizontal, which is to say, 47 degrees from vertical: a 27 degree difference from the Inax.

We have used both Inax and Toto advanced toilet seats both in Japan and in the United States. (The public restrooms in all of Japan's international airports are equipped with Inax toilets, many of them with advanced toilet seats, and a Mercure Hotel where we stayed on a recent visit to Sapporo featured Inax toilets in both the public restrooms and the bathrooms of the guest rooms. However, the toilets in our relatives' homes in Japan are all Toto Washlet equipped.) When we purchased an advanced toilet seat for our own home in the United States, we chose the Inax Clessence ... to fit on a Toto toilet, mainly because of the angle of incidence of the spray. Inax toilet seats fit Toto toilets, and Toto toilet seats fit Inax toilets.

The Inax Clessence (or C-series) has "armrest" controls; the Inax advanced toilet seat that is has a remote control and is the equivalent of the Toto S300 is called the L-series or Luscence; and the Inax equivalents of the Toto Neorest are called Regio and Satis.

I have no...