While I believe consumer reports is not biased by any financial factors (IE companies paying them off for advertising doller, etc) Consumer Reports is still biased, more from their own opinion more than anything, and at the very least, a bit unaccurate. The thing is that what I see out in the field and what people like and rave about is totally different than what the magazine is reporting.
For Example, Sony is one of C.R.'s favorite manufacturers. If it has Sony on it, C.R. will love it no matter what. Out in the field however, I have seen constant problems with Sony laser heads dying, and their LCD projectors are the worst! Their CRT televisions were regularly leaving the factories mis-aligned, and needed convergence and all sorts of tweaking when they came out the box. It's readily apparent that their affection for this manufacturer of electronics comes from their own internal opinion, and not collected data, like failure ratios, out of box performance, etc.
Consumer Reports also seems to have an odd phoenominon of inconstent repporting of similar products. Products that roll off of the same assembly line and are different only in styling will frequently receive dramatically different results on reliability and performance. Also, they don't seem to take into account changes in internal design when they give their ratings.
An example of this instance is the Ford Escort. Prior to 1991, the Escort received relatively poor reviews, which I choose to debate in their own right, as the cars were very popular throughout the eighties, and many racked up some amazingly high mileage. Anyways, in 1991, Ford redesigned the Escort, and it was basically a re-skinned version of the Mazda 323. The Mazda version got good reviews...the Ford version didn't! C.R.'s blamed the poor ratings on the fact that the car was an Escort, and previous versions of the vehicle received poor ratings. The data they reported obviously did not come from hard factual evidence, but simply their reporters walking through the parking lot saying "Hmmm, that looks like a good one, but that's a bad one"
