Sanyo ECJ-D55S 5.5-Cup Rice Cooker

Pros: Easy-to-use, easy-to-maintain creator of perfect rice.
Cons: Expensive

Being Asian, we eat rice every day. Our previous rice cooker was a single switch controlling heat to an aluminum pot. The rice came out mostly fine though sometimes burned grains stuck to the bottom of the pot. Cleaning it involved much scrubbing with a ...

Pros: Makes wonderful porridge and brown rice, as well as white rice; also steamer and slow-cooker.
Cons: None except for absence of a see-through tempered glass lid which some models have.

I didn't think I wanted or needed a rice cooker until I heard about the newer models that had settings for porridge. I like oatmeal and other hot breakfast cereals, but I had been making instant oatmeal because it was so hard to cook steel cut oats on ...

Pros: Tasty, reliable rice. Attractive rice cooker.
Cons: Poor service network

The ECJ-D55S cooks pretty good rice. I usually cook short grain 'Japanese style" rice which comes out moist and reliably tasty in the regular cycle. The machine is a fairly attractive plastic bodied rice cooker with metal on the top and front (as the ...

Pros: settings for any kind of rice cook and steam simultaneously titanium removable inner pot
Cons: water collects under the lid and you need to wipe it off to clean

This machine can basically do it all for a family of 2. It can make enough servings of rice for a crowd, or even chili, soup, jambalaya, pudding, oatmeal as well. It has a timer so you can set it to cook for a specific time and go off and run errands. It will automatically switch to warm when done. It also has a steamer basket so that you may steam veggies or shrimp, etc. while rice is cooking!