Amen to Calflyer. Personal experience is best, followed in short order by personal experience by someone you trust. You can get lots of bulls**t from fellow flyers at the field, too. If anybody reads Model Aviation, they started doing product reviews, but made it clear that they would not publish a bad review. In other words, if the product stunk, they wouldn't publish the review. Their advice was don't buy anything that hadn't been reviewed. I thought this was a little fishy at first, but the more I thought about it, the more it made (a little) sense. Same probably goes for other mags, bad reviews don't get published. So if new gear hits the market, wait for a review or buddies experience, otherwise you're taking a risk. No review probably means junk product. Course, all bets are off for most gas or other low volume products.

My two cents,
Rein