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That's a good deal. I got the same camera before Christmas at Costco for $599. I have to return it soon before they enforce their new return policy. Only problem, which is common with most camcorders, is lighting. You may need to add an external light on top for it to pickup well. Outdoors in natural sunlight is great, but indoors needs good lighting or else it tends to come out grainy. The convenience of the HD is awesome, but the bad thing is that it records in mpeg2, so if you want to edit the videos and put it on dvd, you'll have to recompress it again. It's like having an mp3, then editing it, then saving again. You have to lose quality to re-encode it. Where as if you have DV tape, you edit in lossless DV AVI then encode it to mpeg2.

Gotcha, so you think it would serve me well? Whats a good simple program to edit video's with? I'm not looking to shoot a motion picture with it, but how bad will the quality be if I edit, and have to re-encode?

Oh, btw this is my first camcorder.

i dont think you'll beat it for the money you spent. look into ways to work with the lighting, and you should be fine.

Amazon.com
List Price: $799.99
Price: $749.00
You Save: $50.99 (6%)

Your price: $349.33

i'd say you got hell of a deal.

thats a good deal. got my first handycam way back in 2000 and got it for $2500. i think you can edit directly from the cameras HD, then export to dvd.

if you're serious into editing, MiniDV is still the way to go. But fpor the price, it's a good deal of course.

I think I'll hold onto it then. I mainly want to get some video of some of my gigs, and document my up and comming deployment.

Oh damn, I can record TV shows with this thing if I use the TV/Video out on the back of my TV. Sweeet! Its kinda like a ghetto DVR.