In this study, we compared two types of EEG modalities, sensory-motor rhythms (SMR) and movement related cortical potentials (MRCP), on four healthy subjects performing ballistic or repetitive movement imagination. The EEG waveform morphology across subjects was similar for MRCPs, whereas there was not a clear pattern for SMRs. The rank-sum test showed a significant difference between the amplitude of baseline and that of the MRCP as early as 2 s prior to imagery onset, for both types of motor imageries, indicating strong discriminative power of MRCPs for predicting movement onset. For SMR, this type of discriminative power was relatively weak and highly subject-specific. On the other hand, the SMR landscape under the two movement imagery types was distinctive, holding a potential for discriminating the two movement imagery types. These preliminary results presented different characteristics of SMR and MRCP under different motor imageries, providing valuable information regarding the design and implementation of motor imagery based on BCI system.