When people say that quartz looks like "fake" stone it always makes me scratch my head. For me, I love it because it is clean and uniform--if I wanted "real" stone with the variability that comes with real stone, I'd choose granite or marble. Saying it looks like fake stone is like saying that cork looks like fake wood. Two very different materials, two very different looks. Neither one is better--it's what style you prefer. Exactly! But I have found that many people try to sell quartz counters saying they look like granite but are better/easier/tougher (which I think has already been addressed above). Some of their colours do appear to be in fact imitating the look of real stone. I don't think they do well at that, but I totally agree with you that it's a great choice if you want a uniform or clean look or their vibrant colours.

Hot pans can scorch the resin of quartz countertops. Damaged resin can't be buffed back to its original sheen, so you want to avoid it by placing hot pads under your pans. Read the Use and Care info and the warranty of any quartz you're considering. They're available on their websites. Be aware that there are some off brands of Chinese quartz which do not use the patented Breton machinery of the big boys. There have been problems reported here with some Chinese quartz.

Home depot only sells Formica countertops that the customer can install themselves. If you purchase any other material - quartz-marble-granite- they charge for installation and have Home Depot contractors that install it.

All of you who are hating on the OP can just stop with that crap right now. The issue is that MSI are either liars, idiots or both. I live about 15 minutes from an MSI showroom/warehouse and we went over there twice (last month, March 2021) to pick out countertop slabs, and had the exact bar code and name on our pull sheet for the delivery to the fabricator that MSI uses. Which is Midnight Majesty - Concrete Finish, that's what we bought, the MSI website and the showroom and every person in there calls it that, and if you call MSI on the phone or walk into their shop, that's what it is. Nothing else, and nothing different. So the installers show up at my house yesterday and they have stuff that has "www.belenco.com" stamped all over the back. We looked at a LOT of slab options, manmade and natural, and we have a decent budget for the size of our project, and we're paying for multiple slabs to cover the space. I want what I paid for, that's all. I called MSI and the guy on the phone SWORE to me that this slab was NOT FROM MSI. No way, not possible. They don't even know who Belenco is, he tells me. Now the installers are freaking out, we are freaking out, the guy who owns the fabrication shop is not answering his phone and we have to choose whether or not we are going to let them install something that the freaking supplier says IS NOT WHAT WE PAID FOR at all. And now we see "Volcano Black" stamped on the back of the slabs as well. WTF is Volcano Black and what does it have to do with us? I called back to MSI - and on the second call, someone else tells me that they don't know Belenco, if that slab says "Volcano Black" on it, then it's NOT an MSI product. Installers take the whole mess and leave, our project manager is now freaking out, he goes over to the fabrication shop, finds the offcuts from our project, and says they have the same stamped on the back. I get in the car, go to MSI - boy were they surprised - and asked them to pull a slab and let me see the back. At this point they are freaking out since they've told me twice that it's not their product that's been delivered to my house. Anyone want to bet as to what I found on the back of that slab in their warehouse? And the back of a bunch more slabs? Funny how when you get into the guts of their warehouse you can see what's in there, but they don't allow you past the first couple rows when they are showing you pulled slabs. So now we are going to have to get our install next week, everyone in the project is pissed off, and all this could have been SO easily avoided if MSI had simply said, "yes, that's our product" instead of lying about it TWICE when I called them and had to make a snap decision. My only real regret at this point is that we didn't just pay the 25% more and get the Diresco from Stone Collection that we originally found, even though we'd have had to wait for a shipment to come in. If you Google around a bit, you can see that MSI and Belenco have been working together since 2015, and this is not the first - not even close - time that this has been an issue. It also turns out that MSI/Belenco/a couple other Turkish and Indian companies got popped by the US Dept of Commerce and fined for dumping and improper gov't subsidies in 2018 when Cambria Quartz went after them in court.