Playing with Panasonic and Sony's Blu-ray disc recorders

Maybe we shouldn't feel so bad that the first-generation of high-capacity Blu-ray disc recorders haven't made it over here from Japan—IDG's Martyn Williams put Panasonic's DMR-E700BD (pictured above) and Sony's BDZ-S77 to the test and found that while they sure can record high-defintion television broadcasts without much loss of picture quality,
there were some compatibility issues playing discs recorded with one machine on the other. Not a huge deal when there are only two models on the market, but definitely a headache they'll want to prevent before these things go mass market.