Quote:
Originally Posted by pwjone1
My understanding of CR's methodology is that they hire test engineers, buy products on the open market, test them, publish the results. Because the market is at times so complex, it's impossible to cover everything, even if they could do it today, there would be a new product tomorrow. They do reader surveys, those are used to establish reliability and other results. No process is perfect, with an engineer you just get one person's trained input, maybe a little better than typical journalist's understanding of the field and how to test things, but trained input or not, as with anything, there will be errors from time to time. But then if we ignored everything/everyone that didn't have an occasional error, we would not have much in the way of input (we'd not be reading here, for one). Your average consumer is not going to have the time to pour through enthusiast forums (and even if they did, enthusiasts serve a valuable function, but they can get tied up on esoterics at times). The consumer likes their information in a simple form, 1 page rankings, another page or two on trade-offs and things to know before making a purchase. And mostly that's what CR does.
So let me ask this question, maybe put it into context. Nobody is saying CR is perfect. But I think the larger question is, is there anything you would like to offer up as better?
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Nice post, and right on the money. Between CR and people doing reviews on Amazon, I can get a pretty good idea on what to expect when I buy a product.