  It is well known that lossless compression of a discrete memoryless source
with near-uniform encoder output is possible at a rate above its entropy if and
only if the encoder is randomized. This work focuses on deriving conditions for
near-uniform encoder output(s) in the Wyner-Ziv and the distributed lossy
compression problems. We show that in the Wyner-Ziv problem, near-uniform
encoder output and operation close to the WZ-rate limit is simultaneously
possible, whereas in the distributed lossy compression problem, jointly
near-uniform outputs is achievable in the interior of the distributed lossy
compression rate region if the sources share non-trivial G\'{a}cs-K\"{o}rner
common information.
