Ratings, Reliability Owner Satisfaction

The Quick Guides, product ratings, and brand reliability and owner satisfaction information that follow are designed to help you zero in on the model you want to buy. See the buying advice highlights in the Quick Guides to help you decide what you want from a product. Then go to the ratings charts to get the details on performance.

FOR SOME PRODUCT categories you’ll find full rat ings that include every currently avail able model we tested. For others, the ratings charts show a select models recommended for most people and models designated as CR Best Buys.

To develop our ratings, we put all models within a category through weeks of testing, side by side, so that test results can be compared. We rank products by performance.

Consumer Reports checked that the products rated in this Buying Guide were still available at press time. But depend ing on how long after publication you use this book, you might find a rating for a product that’s no longer available. Or you might not find a rating for a model that’s available because it hadn’t been tested as of publication. Introducing Our New Overall Score Consumer Reports evaluates a variety of factors for every product we test— performance, predicted reliability, and owner satisfaction.

Now CR is incorporating data from those assessments into one Overall Score, as we did with our autos ratings starting in 2016.

The result is a single integrated rating that will make it even easier for you to make a well-informed buying decision. We started with refrigerators and washers and dryers and are now apply- ing our integrated Overall Score to all major appliances, many small appliances, home and garden products, and electronics we test.

By combining the results of performance tests in our labs with the data we collect through surveys of CR members, our new Overall Score gives a holistic picture of product quality.

One result of this is that models from brands with high reliability ratings might cluster at the top of the ratings while brands with poor reliability are penalized. We believe that’s a good thing because it more closely reflects your experience with a product.