I cooked tasty rice on a stovetop with no major incidents for 17 years, but I love my rice cooker. Similar examples: I can do arithmetic just fine, but I typically use a calculator to balance my checkbook; I've used a "manual" saw, but I often use a powered circular saw.

Reasons for using a rice cooker include:
-Free up burner on stove for cooking other items
-A good rice cooker "holds" the rice so it's well-textured, hot, and tasty for hours after it's done
-It's trouble free--every so often when I used the stovetop method, I wouldn't keep as close an eye as I should have on the pot during the initial heating phase, and it would boil over, creating a mess on the stove that I'd have to clean up. Doesn't happen with a rice cooker
-Timer function--have rice ready when you walk in the door from work, have steel-cut oats ready as soon as you wake up in the morning, etc.

Also, it doesn't just cook rice--all grains can be cooked in it, and lost of people cook meals--search for 'rice cooker cookbook' on Amazon, and you'll find books with recipes for full meals done in a rice cooker.

There are so many reasons for items such as rice cookers some of which you touch on.

Many home cooks try their best to cook to the standards they experience in the fine restaurants they visit. But there's one element they overlook and I've not seen discussed. The plate of food they experience in the restaurant has possbily been prepared by several different people preparing elements at the same time to a "point". Preparing a meal in the kitchen therefore presents several challenges for the home cook about how to have everything ready at "the point" at the same time - but doing it all themselves with no help. Help such as intelligent rice cookers provide some assistance.

The best example in my view of such items are the new breed of sous vide baths which allow the home cook to produce proteins to a very high and consistant quality that can be finished when everything else is "at the point".

Breadmakers provide something different. For example I'm normally up at around 6am and I like an expresso and some French bread. Without the bread machine I need to get up somewhat earlier than 6am!

There seems to be an undercurrent or implication amongst some non-users that the use of these aids imasculates the cook. That real men hand knead their dough and wimps don't. Or bread makers don't make proper bread. Not so.

There's another thing. Almost every one of them I didn't "need" before I bought them but once I had them most of them I wouldn't do without. The list is endless, toasters, kettles, vacuum machines, electic slicers, electric knives, sous vide, pizza oven, mini ovens, beehive oven, slow cooker, microwaves, waffle machine, panini toaster, magimix, stick blender, hand whisk, fruit juicer ...... oh I could go on ..... and now the Zoji.

Well I had an oops moment w/ my rice cooker two days ago- you know the vent on top that says in several languages to keep your fingers away, yeah, best to abide by it... with just a brief second of exposure [to see if it was functioning] it created a nice blister on my ring finger... and I cooled it down w/ cold water immediately afterwords and put an ice cube on it while eating dinner.

You're lucky. I am unable to restrain myself from putting my nose over the vent on my Zoji to sniff the contents.

Just made a pot of McCann's Steel Cut Irish Oats. It boiled over when I stepped away for a minute.

Mr. Zoji is next on my list of things to get.

I'm away from home at the moment and missing my Zoji.

I bought my inexpensive rice cooker over 10 years ago from some little supermarket on Canal Street. Still works beautifully making the rice nice and sticky. ^

I borrowed a friend's cheapo rice cooker today. I tried to make oatmeal with it this morning, but wound up with oaty goo being spewed out of the cooker as it boiled over. Luckily, I saw this coming and had the rice cooker in the sink. The oatmeal got finished on the stove.

I now have quinoa, chicken, and vegetables in it. It smells great, and is making some happily rattley noises. We'll see what happens!

Had my 7-cup Aroma rice cooker for years. Works great, perfect rice every time. I love it!!!

The amount of oatmeal you can make in a rice cooker is dramatically smaller than the amount of rice you can make. My '10 cup' rice cooker can make that much white rice, but only 8 cups of brown rice, and only 2.5 cups of porridge.

Makes sense. Thanks.

I actually made rice (Texmati brown basmati) the other day. It was very good, but no better or worse than rice I make on the stove. So while I'd like a rice cooker of my own because I like gadgets, I am unsure of the value proposition.

It's all a matter of your situation. In my previous home, my wife's old cheap three-cup rice cooker (one button for 'on' and that's it) was often a help in that it often freed up room on my four-burner 30" stovetop, and had 'set-and-forget' functionality.

In my current home, with a five-burner 36" cooktop, I got a fancy 10-cup cooker with a timer, keep-warm feature, and separate cooking modes for different types of rice and porridge. The other day, I got a curry going in the slow cooker, and I put a batch of basmati rice into the cooker and set the timer for when the curry would be ready--I didn't have to remember to start the rice on time, etc. Being able to make steel-cut oats overnight for the whole family plus guests is another huge draw for me.

Of course the big fancy model cost a lot more than a three-cup model with no frills, but the extra money was worth it in my situation.

The purchase of our Zoji made us rethink how we eat in our second home which has been problematic for us.

The combination of the slow cooker and the Zoji means we can prepare the food at breakfast time and forget it. We can go for a long walk or spend as long as we want at the pub and the food will always be perfect when we return home. And we don't have to return earlier in order to allow and hour or so to cook lunch.

So we're finding there's more curries, braised lamb shanks, coq au vin etc. We've just recieved Zoji#2 to save Zoji#1 having to travel back and forth with us .....

It is funny what train of events buying a decent rice cooker can start ..... and I can certainly see why someone working could use a rice cooker and slow cooker combination to have really nice food to come back to after a hard days slog.

Interesting timing, I woke up this morning wanting a rice cooker, now after reading this thread, I want a rice cooker, a bread maker and a slow cooker.

Fortunately I have something better at the moment. I hired a maid. How many of your rice cookers scrub themselves clean, pour you a glass of drink and then go do the shopping? :-P

The Zoji is clean with a wipe and doesn't constantly whine. No one pours a drink like me - for me and Ocado deliver the shopping ...... and I can lock and shut the front door once it's all done.

By the way Zoji's are currently on special offer on the Amazon US site.