A Sneak Peek At Consumer Labs

Here's How 'Consumer Reports' Tests Some Products

(CBS)  For many people, Consumer Reports magazine is the Bible among shopping guides, rating thousands of products every year. How do they do it? WCBS-TV technology editor Brett Larson went behind the scenes for The Early Show as a guest tester at Consumer Reports' top-secret product testing labs in Yonkers, N.Y.

This year, Consumer Reports tested and rated more than 3,000 products, from refrigerators to cell phones, from pots and pans to dish detergent. A good (or bad) rating from Consumer Reports can dramatically affect sales of a product, so testers are sworn to secrecy about the results until they are published.

Inside the lab, reports Larson, things can look pretty wacky. A dummy that looks like something from a bad '80s music video is actually a high-tech computer that's used to test headphones. It even has a hairpiece that helps secure the headphones onto the head.

In the cookware lab, every bubble counts. Hot spots on only one side of the pan mean it isn't heating food evenly.

When it's time to clean, no dishpan hands there. Machines do all the work, scrubbing each pot hundreds of times to measure durability. A tester told Larson that some pans fail in as few as 50 strokes, while others have lasted more than 2,000 strokes.

In the refrigerator lab, the objective that day was to measure how well freezers keep food cold. To do that, testers packed them with boxes of frozen spinach and drilled a temperature sensor into every one.

Consumer Reports first began testing products way back in 1936. Since then, technology has come a long way: Yet another dummy tests cell phones for voice quality. The dummy talks and a computer listens. But don't bother trying to understand; it doesn't use words. "Those are called 'utterances' in the industry," explained a tester, "and those are just standard phonetics and sounds you hear in common speech.

But not all testing done at Consumer Reports uses high-tech equipment. Sometimes there's no substitute for the human eye."

In the television lab, for instance, testers do nothing but stare at the same image on dozens of TVs, evaluating them for color and clarity.

To test the cleaning power of dish detergents, Consumer Reports makes dishes dirty by using "goo" that's made from a combination of common foods you'd find in your kitchen, such as peanut butter, macaroni and cheese, corned beef hash, cola, and even split pea soup. A tablespoon of goo is smeared on each plate and microwaved to a crisp. Then the dishes are loaded and washed with each detergent.

So which detergent cleans the best?

That's a closely guarded secret, only to be revealed in an upcoming issue of Consumer Reports.