Sony Handycam DCR - HC48

I love my new camcorder more than any other one I have owned before. I actually also tried a hard disk camcorder before, but the picture quality is significantly worse than you get with a MiniDV. Then I set my eyes on the HC38 which has a 40x zoom, but a lower resolution. In the end, I am glad to have bought the HC48. The video quality is flawless, the "Easy" feature makes recording easy :) even for beginners - for me, I like to turn the feature off and play with some of the settings, but there is very little that really really needs to be changed - I change settings more out of habit than anything else. The battery is decent enough to last 80-100 minutes on average and lasts me almost 2 casettes (even though the cassette is 60 min each, I typically use 30-40 mins or so at my daughter's program or swimming lesson or anything similar). Creating a DVD after copying the data onto the PC using the Firewire cable (the cable does not come with the camcorder, but can be bought for cheap on EBay) is very very simple (it takes the time that it is supposed to, but no fancy editing required).

All in all, it is a very nice model and fits the needs of beginner to even advanced users. I recommend this whole-heartedly and much much more than a hard-drive or a DVD camcorder (the MPEG2 compression in both of those makes the video quality significantly poorer than the MiniDV).