Ah. Rice. My wife and I are very picky about our rice...

First off, we think rice cooker > pan, in nearly all situations except when you want to make fried rice (chinese style), and require the last bit of frying in a pan...

Regarding rice cookers:
- We've had many a many a rice cooker, and tasted rice from many different rice cookers. We also live in Japan some of the time and get to taste their new cookers.
- In terms of rice, I think rice is a big factor. If you can get high quality rice (I'm not sure how rice is sold in the USA), then you will get a good meal in the end. We know people who own rice fields and they are the source of most of our rice.
- Low quality cookers. Cheapo brands, there is not much difference in what you buy. Eventually, it will simply be what kind of rice you use. If you put high quality rice in those cheapo cookers, it will inevitably taste nicer than the crap you put in.
- Medium quality cookers. Inevitably the same as the cheapo brands. The higher quality your rice, the better it will taste. I think it is a good investment to get at least a medium quality cooker. The low quality cookers will die with time, nearly always, and the rice quality will become worse and worse.
- High quality cookers. Japan is the place. We own a Mitsubishi NJ-XSB10J. It uses a charcoal cooker inside, and has a steam system which recycles the steam from the cooked rice to be used to cook the rice again. It's absolute heaven. For high quality cookers, even if you use some crap rice, you will end up getting something more than edible; great for a meal. If you use high quality rice...drool. Ours cost around $600 (USD) and we forked out $250 for a transformer to bring it to Aust.

In the end, after buying many cookers, we just forked it out for what we have now. Couldn't go back.

Just from our experiences and our 2c.

Hope it helps