I've had the Panasonic DMR EH55 for a few months now. I immediately noticed the remote control does not have an eject button. I purchased a Logitech Harmony remote control (model 550) and set it up to operate the EH55. Within the menu of the Harmony Remote control, when I hit the eject button the EH55 opens the disc tray. Hitting the button again closes it. Obviously the EH55 understands a remote command to eject. Why was an eject button overlooked on the EH55's remote?

P.S. Going through the EH55's manual I see that if you have a problem with the unit and can't get the disc out, it says to hit the standby button. Once unit is off press the stop button and channel ^ button at the same time to eject the disc. I wouldn't try that under normal conditions.

I tried other things with the EH55 remote such as holding down the stop button a few seconds to see if that would eject but it doesn't. (Some recorders eject that way).

Panasonic probably decided to use the remote "button space" for another function. The lack of an eject button is common on many DVD recorders.

It was a pretty rare VCR that had a cassette eject button on the remote. I guess the argument was that you needed to be there, at the machine itself, to drop a disk into the tray, or remove on from the tray, so the button on the remote is really unnecessary. The earlier machines had eject buttons, but somewhere around the E85 Panasonic removed the eject button from the remote. As you found out, the machines still respond to the IR eject signal. If you buy an older Panasonic remote, it will have the eject button and it will work the the newer machines. It will be missing some of the functions of your newer machine though.

I found that with VCRs if you had a "play-only" tape in the machine you could eject it remotely by hitting the "record" button. I have not tried that with the EH75, but it should work, at least with VCRs - I don't know about DVD-Rs.

At least one old Panasonic model, the E100H, had an eject button on the remote. More recent models have "lost" the button, but seem still to respond to the eject IR code.