My old JVC minidv camcorder broke last week so I've been looking around for a replacement. I need something that works in low light, I video a lot of stuff in indoor swimming pools and gyms. I also wanted something robust that maybe I could use in my race car for videos also. That rules out tape, hard drive and DVD camcorders. Flash camcorders it is. It looks like there are two price ranges now which also map to Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD). The manufactuers seem to have used this to also put the cool stuff only on HD camcorders. Cool stuff means optical image stabilisation and low light handling. Typical. SD ones costs under 500 bucks, HD above that.
I ended up choosing a Canon HF100. This is a HD camcorder with no built in flash memory. You use a SDHC card which can hold up to 32GB. 1GB is around 7 minutes of HD video. I bought 2 16GB class 6 cards for 40 bucks each. Each card holds 112 minutes then so thats plenty. I didn't buy a camcorder with builtin flash because Canon wants 200 bucks for 16GB of memory, the card is 40 so that make no sense at all. It has 12x optical zoom which is needed also.
I also bought the extended battery which cost 90 bucks. Total cost with one day shipping is 780 bucks. I bought from Amazon.com. They had the camcorder for 600 bucks. Locally, I tried a small camera specialist but they disappointed me in that they were'nt any more skilled than a local big box store. I asked the difference between the HF10 and HF100 and they picked up the box and starting reading. I can do that, I was looking for expertise to justify their higher prices (799!!) for the HF100. 200 bucks for the same service as a typical big box store. The local big box store didn't have the HF100 in stock so I went to Amazon.
All the reviews I've read on the web point to this unit as the 'best' one right now to buy so I'll post more then it arrives next week.
