I used to use DAT tapes a lot, and man am I glad that's basically a dead format at this point. The tapes are very small and fragile, and DAT machines often had a nasty tendency to eat tapes. It's not just me, I saw it happen with all sorts of different machines. I also found the transports of DAT machines to be fragile, requiring frequent trips to the shop for adjustment or just plain dying young.
The Panasonic 3700 has a special mode you can get into to see the error rate, and keeping the machine aligned to produce a low error rate was an art unto itself. My recording engineer had his machine beautifully maintained so that it produced a very low error rate. But he had it in the shop all the time. And even then, after I had my machine serviced by the same guy that did his mine produced much higher error rates. And you could hear the difference. Subtle but audible.