YONKERS, NY -- Every once in a while, Consumer Reports opens its test facilities to others in the media for a show and tell, typically just as a major magazine issue approaches: holiday gifts in the fall, sometimes new cars in the spring. This week, with the impending release of its Best Electronics holiday issue (December), Consumer Reports showed off its massive facilities in Yonkers, NY, a half-hour north of New York City.

Consumer Reports Labs Slideshow: Click Here

What's a Deadline?
For more than half a century, Consumer Reports has prided itself on thorough testing, sometimes with an academic researcher's leisurely concern for timeliness. Example: A decade ago, CR reviewed 29 laptop PCs; an asterisk next to half the entries noted, in fine print at the bottom, that the models were no longer on the market. Thorough but useless if you wanted to buy laptops. But that was then.

Since then, CR has speeded up testing and fast-tracked tests of key products (a new Apple iPod, for instance), providing more timely competition for the likes of pcmag.com's PC Labs, which often reports initial findings in parallel with the release of a new product. Now at Consumer Reports, for instance, a typical test cycle for notebooks runs six weeks and results are immediately posted to the CR website and in the next issue of the magazine 2-4 weeks later. To aid testing timeliness, CR sometimes buys products directly from the manufacturer before retail availability, then buys second test units in retail to see how much, if any, manufacturers optimized review units. (It happens.)

Biggest test category: HDTV
Television is the biggest test category, and biggest electronics-testing expense for the non-profit Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports and the pay-to-view ConsumerReports.org. One test room was filled with two-dozen LCD TVs, with plasmas in another room, and digital converter boxes in a third area. The December issue check-rates 28 LCD and 15 plasma TVs, including nine Samsungs, eight Panasonics, and five Sonys. There are also reviews of electronics retailers (B&H Photo and Crutchfield have the highest scores for online, Apple for walk-ins), Blu-ray and DVD players, camcorders, stereo receivers and home theater sets, digital cameras, digital picture frames, computers, printers, and AA batteries.

Applying Test Lab Results to the Real World
Consumer Reports tests in lab settings that may be far removed from the situation in your house: best-quality video signals for testing TVs, million-dollar anechoic chambers lined with sound-absorbing foam for testing loudspeakers, copper-lined rooms for testing cellphones. (CR doesn't test TV with FIOS even though readers rate it best because FIOS hasn't come to their part of Yonkers yet.) But knowing how products work under good conditions allows CR to characterize the performance as conditions degrade, says Evon Beckford, senior director of the electronics division and a 31-year CR veteran.

Also: Product Tests for the Less Affluent
Over the years, Consumer Reports has tested more and more upscale yuppie products such as SubZero refrigerators and Viking stoves whose models can cost more than $5,000. (Let's not forget the Lotus Elise, an impractical, barely street-legal sports car that's $40,000-plus.) But there's always testing dollars reserved for products more likely to be bought by less affluent Americans, such as digital converters that allow you to keep using existing TVs after the 2009 analog-to-digital switchover. And then there's advocacy: When CR finds a product that's dangerous, it blows the whistle online, in print, and in Washington. Our electronics-lab tour detoured to see a lightweight battery-powered LawnBott robotic lawn mower (think Roomba for grass) whose blade continued spinning when it was tilted or picked by up by a handle near the base. CR showed how it could lop off someone's fingers, demonstrating with a hot dog on a long stick as a substitute digit. (See the video.)

Bribed by Consumer Reports!
Full disclosure: For the record, you should know that on the way out, fiercely independent CR provided goodie bags to departing editors and analysts: a tote bag emblazoned with the Consumer Reports name, a reporter's notebook and ball point pen (both with Consumer Reports logos), and a huge gray pullover with the CR logo that recalls journalist Dorothy Parker's tussle with personal ethics. (Parker: I couldn't accept this fur coat; it wouldn't be ethical. And it's not my size.) Oh, and four frosted cookies wrapped in cellophane and a bit past prime freshness, each with Consumer Reports tags securing the wrappers. So, if the accompany slideshow seems excessively positive, you know why. If you see typos in the post, it was cookie crumbs that jammed the keyboard.