On 10/11/15 18:22, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article ,
Tim Watts wrote:
You only have to read a camera review on dpreview.com and a Which review
to know how lightweight they are.

Right. So just who would you trust for a washing machine performance
assessment?


Anything except Which.

Amazon, Reevoo and similar for user reviews (some of which can be quite
detailed). Amazon I like because they let you go back and add edits, so
you do sometimes get a bit of long term feedback too.

Not sure I'd trust buyer reviews of that sort.

I've always Amazon have been *extremely* useful if you get a reasonable
number. Sure, there's the odd shrill, but it's fairly rare.

When I've "take a chance" against a couple of reviews having warnings,
on occasion I've experienced the same mode of failure.

Generally I try to stick with 90+% 5 star and almost zero 1,2 stars and
I've very rarely been disappointed. Best thing that ever happened to
retail...

I wish there was something equivalent for trades...

It's a long time since I subscribed to Which, but when I did I was never
disappointed with getting their best buy for something like a washing
machine. Cameras and Hi-Fi etc are such a personal thing you'd tend to
look at specialist mag for those. But even then I'd doubt you'd always
agree with it.


I did a trial about 15 years back (after getting used to Internet mobo
reviews) and was less than impressed. They seemed to get the thing out
the box and spend an hour with it. No extreme testing, no engineering
opinion of "this looks well made, this not so, there's a flumblewidget
which is good..."

It was good when there was no alternative (80s) but, perhaps my
expectations are higher, but they do not seem to be really testing the
products. I'll allow perhaps they've got better recently?