IMO the Korean brands are the market leaders. Check out Cuckoo
I don’t know if the former is true but the latter seemed to be on the ones I saw.
It is known that brown rice requires a different ratio of water, but this is something that can be replicated with any method. Does the special brown rice setting change the heat output of the rice cooker?
[1]: Fancy rice cookers use non-constant power, or so I've heard. Not sure how much it influences the taste, though.
If the salesperson wasn't lying, he was probably referring to other cultivars of rice, not just brown rice. For example, long grain rice obviously requires different settings than short grain rice. Southeast and South Asia have much more diversity of rice than Northeast Asia.
Our cuckoo is a preassure cooker, and the rice it makes is the best I’ve had.
We currently live in Tokyo, and the Panasonic we got here is not as good as the cuckoo. Maybe because the power here is weaker?
Higher pressure = higher boiling point = higher cooking temperature = different taste.
Korean rice cookers modeled after the Gamasot are basically autoclaves. The good ones maintain a pressure of about 2 atm and a cooking temperature of 120C. Unpressurized rice cookers are more common in Japan, and Japanese people are more used to the texture of rice cooked at 100C. Your sushi probably won't taste right if you cook the rice at 120C.
Rice cooked without pressure comes out light and fluffy. This is more appropriate for sushi where you don't want the flavor of rice to overwhelm or collide with the subtle flavor of the other ingredients.