Any experience with Insignia NS-DV111080F?

[twister6]

I know these are Best Buy "own brand" budget electronics. It seems to be packed with a lot of features and based on the user reviews and their tech support forum reading, I can't find too many negatives. I know, you get what you pay when you spend $300, but this is flash based HD 10MP camcorder with 3" touch screen, 12x optical zoom, 10MP stills, and also an option to record to AVI. I did buy and later returned back Vixia M30 since I wasn't too happy with its recording in low light, and also pain the arse dealing with MTS format. Of course I shouldn't expect the same optics quality, but curious if anybody has any experience with this Insignia video camera?

[vasic]

The difference between the two devices is like the difference between, well, Canon and Insignia. One is a reputable maker of video cameras with decades of proven track record; the other is a cheap store brand.

Vixia has significantly higher image quality than Insignia. The problems with Insignia are too numerous to mention: lens issues (image distortion, spherical aberration, colour fringing...), image processing issues (significantly inferior processor that simply can't handle any reasonable motion, such as sports, or moving cars), video compression issues (maximum bitrate is less than half of Vixia), frame rate issues (frame rate drops on complex movement)...

The camcorder is designed to look 'serious' (like Canon, Panasonic, Sony, JVC), but it performs just as poorly as Mustek, Aiptek and other sub- $200 brands. Never mind that it doesn't even use AVCHD (current HD tapeless standard), but instead encodes video in some cheap flavour of MPEG-4, wrapped into AVI or MOV.

I don't have issues with Best Buy's store brands as such; I have a DYNEX HDTV, and have no issues with it (it was my cheapest ticket to 40" HDTV). However, I would steer way clear of this device.