Interior paints: all have shortcomings.(Buyers Guide)

If a room has no flaws--it's not too sunny and the walls are perfectly smooth--it's easy to find a good, inexpensive paint. For other rooms, finding the right paint will take work. No paint does everything well, our tests show.

Many paints among the 63 we tested, including some top scorers, were poor for fading and are not the best choice for a sunny room. Other top brands left an irregular surface--fine if you're trying to mask minor flaws in the wall, but not if you want a smooth finish. Others didn't clean up well.

The reason for such variability is that paint manufacturers constantly readjust formulas to improve performance, cut costs, or comply with environmental regulations. Reformulations might improve paint in some ways, but detract in others.

For example, Ace Sensations, a flat-finish paint with Scotchguard from Ace Hardware, is supposed to resist stains. In our tests with grease stains, many other paints did better. But Ace Sensations performed well for other attributes.

Manufacturers continue to try making color selection easier and more accurate. Sample-sized jars, pouches of paint, and oversized paint chips give a bigger picture. Color-matching computers add science to the art: You supply a sample tile or a swatch of upholstery fabric, for example, and the computer comes up with a paint tint formula. But it is not an exact science, we found. (See You Need to Know, page 41.)

HOW TO CHOOSE

See First Things First, below, to size up your room. These should be among your considerations: