  We investigate the extent to which the Palomar-Green (PG) Bright Quasar
Survey (BQS) is complete and representative of the general quasar population by
comparing with imaging and spectroscopy from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. A
comparison of SDSS and PG photometry of both stars and quasars reveals the need
to apply a color and magnitude recalibration to the PG data. Using the SDSS
photometric catalog, we define the PG's parent sample of objects that are not
main-sequence stars and simulate the selection of objects from this parent
sample using the PG photometric criteria and errors. This simulation shows that
the effective U-B cut in the PG survey is U-B < -0.71 (rather than the intended
U-B < -0.44), implying a color-related incompleteness. As the color
distribution of bright quasars peaks near U-B=-0.7 and the 2-sigma error in U-B
is comparable to the full width of the color distribution of quasars, the color
incompleteness of the BQS is approximately 50% and essentially random with
respect to U-B color for z<0.5. There is, however, a bias against bright
quasars at 0.5 < z < 1, which is induced by the color-redshift relation of
quasars (although quasars at z>0.5 are inherently rare in bright surveys in any
case). We find no evidence for any other systematic incompleteness when
comparing the distributions in color, redshift, and FIRST radio properties of
the BQS and a BQS-like subsample of the SDSS quasar sample. However, the
application of a bright magnitude limit biases the BQS toward the inclusion of
objects which are blue in g-i, in particular compared to the full range of g-i
colors found among the i-band limited SDSS quasars, and even at i-band
magnitudes comparable to those of the BQS objects.
