Wanted to bump this up - both to see if anyone's experiences have changed or been added to in the last year, but also to recount what my freshly-out-of-warranty Panasonic DMR-EZ17S is doing to me.
If there are no errors in the disc (IE: It's not a coaster), operation is smooth and it's a good machine. But I've had two coasters in the last week off a spindle, and both times I've gotten trapped in the machine's absolutely abysmal diagnostic routine - the machine powers down, then goes through a little loop (what exactly it does, I don't know - there's no on-screen messages and only a series of squares flashing on the LCD)...then resets and does the same diagnostic loop all over again. It stays trapped in this u61 error cycle for hours. Force-ejects and every other possible output do nothing.
Eventually, after about 2 hours, the disc is released, and the machine works fine again, though the disc is wrecked. If a simple coaster can cause this much trouble, I'd hate to see how the machine reacts to a *real* problem. Panasonic always made solid and reliable products, so to have a two hour outage in one of their DVD recorders due seemingly to a bad disc is mind-boggling. And based on what Google turns up, I appear to be getting off lucky in terms of the u61 errors.
I really expected Panasonic products to work better than this.