Rice cookers come in an unlikely variety of options. The cheapest rice cookers are often a great place to start for college students, recent graduates, or anyone else that's new to rice-making. While they won't let you make the fancy meals that some rice cookers can handle, there's nothing simpler to use. Open cooker, add rice, add water, close cooker, push button. Then, as soon as the cooking light turns off or starts flashing (depending on your brand), you're ready for dinner! You can't add much to your rice, but there are a few variations that you can do. Add milk instead of water for softer, very moist rice; if you want, you can even throw in some cinnamon, sugar, and raisins to make an easy rice pudding. For $20, this kind of cooking convenience is absolutely wonderful--in twenty or thirty minutes, you've prepared dinner for two to four people with barely any work. However, if you find yourself wanting to make much more, you should consider another rice cooker.
A medium quality rice cooker will usually run $70 - $90 depending on the brand. Most of these have a much larger capacity (up to 10 cups of cooked rice, as opposed to the 5 cups you'll usually get from a small rice cooker). They usually provide four or five options instead of a single "cook" button. Such options usually include: a special setting for brown rice; the usual setting for plain white rice; the ability to keep your rice warm, so people who come home late don't have cold food; and a small tray (sometime with its own setting) for steaming vegetables in the rice cooker. It's still hard to cook fancy things in these medium rice cookers, but many of them have non-stick surfaces so you can mix in some pre-cooked meat or frozen vegetables if you like. Just make sure that you clean the rice cooker very thoroughly after use.
If you choose to buy a large, top-of-the line rice cooker (which generally costs $100 - $150), you're really buying two appliances in one. While they do cook up to 20 cups of rice (or forty servings!), that's only the beginning. Expect these rice cookers to be able to double as slow cookers, complete with the usual settings you can find there for cook time, heat, etc. Take advantage of this by mixing your favorite vegetables and spices into your rice, or throw out rice all together and make a delectable pot roast or a host of deliciously steamed vegetables. Again, making sure to keep these clean is especially important when you're cooking with things other than rice. However, unlike other rice cookers these are designed to stand up to a wide variety of cooking tasks. Many cookbooks or online recipes give excellent ways to use your slow rice cooker: make delicious meals while you save time otherwise spent cooking. Most of the time, all you need to do is choose and prepare your ingredients, throw everything into the pot, turn on and walk away. In just a few hours (much of which you might otherwise spend tending to food on the stove or in the oven), come back to a delicious meal that everyone will love.