RichA wrote:

If the goal of magazines is to provide enough solid information
to consumers to make themselves interesting and valuable, [...]

It sounds cruel, but really, you don't seem to have a clue.

The goal of a magazine is to make money. In most cases, they do this
by attracting an audience for their advertisers, with articles,
pictures, commentary, etc. They are not going to bite the hand that
feeds them. If not conducting detailed optical tests and printing the
results loses (say) 1% of their potential readership, but saves 100%
of their revenue, to a first approximation you can pretty easily guess
what the magazine will do.

There are, however, interesting ways to appear "objective" which
really aren't. If the magazine does do some quantitative testing, you
may find they won't provide much analysis of the results, or simply
fail to come to a definitive conclusion, or just ignore the tests in
whatever conclusion they reach (this is what some amateur radio
publications tend toward) -- leaving the unsavvy completely in the
dark with warm, fuzzy reviews. If they do the tests, and provide some
substantive analysis, you'll find they only review top of the line
equipment: no lemons will _ever_ be reviewed. (Knowing what not to
buy is just as important as knowing what to buy.) And if they
actually review a lemon, you can expect they'll find something good to
say about it anyways, unless they don't have a contract with the
manufacturer (e.g., the "department store telescope").

Basically, your only recourse here is to find a magazine that derives
all of its income from its subscribers, or (equivalently?) read the
various reviews one can find on the net. My start point is:

www.google.com: name_of_item review

Check both the web and google-groups.

No one takes reviews in an advertising-based magazine very seriously,
and no amount of ranting will change this.