The A-C rep who was visiting a local cooking supply store said she thought the powder did a better job on the A-C SS cookware, FWIW.

I have some Cuisinart, Belgique, Fagor, and Kuhn Rikon stainless items and the BKF powder works great on all of them.

By the way, BBB has it in my town, but my local supermarket carries it as well.

"Solarpowered - if you check in here - should my Atlantis/silvonix have what look like brush lines in it? Or rather the whole thing sort of looks like that. hard to describe."

I'm not getting into THS very often these days. :)

I checked my pans. The finish on the interiors looks lightly brushed. I think this is a good thing, because you will scratch the inside if you use metal utensils, and a brushed finish looks better than a mirror finish after you start actually using the pans. (Note: The brushed finish consists of circumferential lines, not random brush marks.)

The exteriors of my pans are somewhere between a mirror finish and brushed finish. It's definitely not a mirror finish, but it does reflect a fairly coherent image. It think "mat finish" would describe it fairly accurately. It looks very slightly brushed, with barely-perceptible circumferential markings.

I'm describing this carefully, because I saw an Atlantis pan at Sur la Table that had very heavy markings on the outside--it looked for all the world like it had been turned on a lathe, with very rough tool marks. I don't know what the deal was with that. I just got a new Atlantis Saute Pan that was newly manufactured (I know that it was new, because I had to wait (practically forever, it seemed) until they made a new batch and shipped it from Belgium) late last summer, and it was exactly as I described in the first paragraph. So I don't think they've changed the style of the finish; all my pans, spanning the last three years, have exactly the same finish.

Thanks, this sounds right. I used it last night for the first time. It heats up really fast on my old electric burners. All that agonizing - it may be more responsive I think than cheap/thin aluminim teflon fry pan. Its really heavy though. I can see that's going to be hard for me. I have to figure out what to cook in it now:)