Just cooked first breakfast on a new 15.75 incher. My impressions. First, it's big. I wanted something bigger than my vintage 12 inch cast iron for cooking big batches of veggies and bunches of burgers for the fam. To get a bigger bottom surface area, went with the 15. It's 2 pounds heavier than a #12 cast iron. The pan is thick and the handle is almost comically well built. The 15.75 is way too big for a standard oven, which is fine for my purposes. I cook on a powerful bluestar range with 25k btu burner. I wouldn't go bigger than this size for sure. On a regular range, I have to believe this wouldn't heat evenly on the edges. The 14 would probably fit better on a bluestar with less overhang but I wanted the extra space. This pan and size would probably be good for a drive in campfire cook. High sides, lots of room, big handle.I talk about the seasoning. The instructions on the sticker are deceptive in how easy they make it sound to clean the factory coating off. Warm water and detergent with a brissle brush won't do it. I worked hard on it and the coating just started scratching after 15 minutes. I saw various places people say to use easy-off oven cleaner outside to avoid fumes. Tried it and have to say this is my new method. Sprayed it on and left it in a garbage bag for a couple hours. It still took hard scrubbing but it progressed pretty quick and could easily see where there was and wasn't coating. The effort after easy-off was like what I thought it should have been out of the box. Then I seasoned with canola oil cause that's what I had. Held it over the huge burner till each section smoked. It looked and felt perfect. I would have done this in the oven for a smaller pan. Even with 25k btu, it took a while to get each area to smoke. It's a thick pan. Don't know if the smaller pans are thinner.Weight. The 15.75 is very heavy. I'm a beefcake with strong arms that has no problem one handing a full 12 inch cast iron. This thing is a 2 hander all day. It's very long handle to the far opposite side. The bottom half the handle gets hot. The top half seemed to stay cool.I have a long history with cast iron. Have a bunch of vintage griswold pans of various sizes. Cooked 1000s of meals in CI. My wife has a carbon steel crepe pan and I started messing with it for eggs and I was like, what's this? Seemed light and very non-stick. I've wanted something bigger than a #12 cast iron for bigger meals. So after a bunch of research, I ended up with this 15.75 to get a bigger bottom surface than a #12. I think the 15.75 is maybe an inch wider at the bottom, which is quite a bit more in area when you do the math.My overall impression of cast iron vs carbon steel is carbon steel is easier to clean. Feels a bit more non-stick. I like that I can run a hot/warm carbon steel pan under water. Don't do that with CI. I cracked a vintage CI pan doing that. I like the longer handles. This newer matfer has the convex bottom which I'm not a fan of. On gas, the oil runs to the outside. It's not terrible, just less than perfect.Temperature IR tests. Did a simple heat comparison with an IR gun between a griswold #12 and the 15.75 matfer. From each pan completely cold, tested each pan every minute on the middle and the outside edge running full blast on the 25k burner each minute. I expected the matfer to be faster to climb. I was surprised.Results (middle of pan and outside edge):#12 Griswold @ 1 min: 370 mid, 288 outside. 2 min: 570 mid, 490 outside.15.75 Matfer @ 1 min: 200 mid, 168 out. 2 min: 340 mid, 235 out. 3 min: 410 mid, 288 out. 4 min: 460 mid, 330 out.Then after the test about 3-5 minutes, didn't measure closely, the #12 was still 330 degrees. The matfer was 160 ish. Matfer had more time to cool as it was tested first. CI definitely holds heat. These are different shaped pans and not really and apple to apple but I expected quicker heats up on the matfer as that's one of its selling points. The CI was blazing in a couple minutes. Not saying that makes it better. That pan does tend to get and stay too hot. The 25k is a monster and I can't imagine how long a 12 or 15k typical burner would take on this pan. Wouldn't be good at all for searing steaks, anything high heat. Just throwing that out if anyone with a regular gas burner is thinking of going this big. I can't speak for induction or electric. Outside cooking on a bayou burner would be a good fit probably.After seasoning, cooked sunny side up eggs and they came out perfect. As non-stick as I expected. Probably a hair more non-stick than the cast iron. Clean up seemed easier. All in all, I'm impressed. I think 15.75 is too big probably even for a bluestar range but is workable. Great quality pan. I'll be picking up some other sizes and will sideline some CI pans other than for searing.