Recommendation for camcorder

[Haopengyou]

I do a lot of recording in class and have been using a high end webcam to do so. The results are not too bad for showing the students in class and if the lighting in the room were perfect, might also be OK to use on the web or project onto large screens..but the lighting is not perfect, so I am looking for other alternatives. I am also looking into ways to augment the lighting.
Good picture quality is important - HD is important because all of the sources that need my files look down on anything else. I do sometimes have to project on a screen that is about 20' wide. I have seen video from $800 HD camcorders (tape) about 3 years ago that seemed to be adequate for my purposes - especially given the fact that the people who were using the cameras were not very well versed in how to use them.
Sound quality, for me, is more important than picture quality. I teach esl and often make short videos to show in class or in training, and the sound quality has to be high enough to be able to distinguish amongst several nuances of language, whether it is Chinese or English. As I read through the details of recent camcorders, most of the hype is about the picture quality, recording attributes, etc but I did not see much to help me distinguish sound quality. I have read about type 1 & 2 DV. Type 2 stores the sound in a separate track. Does that make it easier to edit, more flexible and higher quality? The ideal scenario for me would be to have a camcorder with a jack for an external mic and plug a sound mixer into that....or better yet, have a camcorder that gives me multiple sound tracks on the tape without reducing the video quality. I am rambling here a bit because I am not so familiar with the options - hoping someone will understand my ramblings and send me in the right direction.
So...the microphone jack is important...user selectable/adjustable white balance is important. Image stabilization - probably will be useful because I will start to do more candid things. Up until now most of my recording has been done using a tripod. A remote control would also be very, very useful. Optical zoom 10-25x is probably enough. New or gently used is ok and around $600. Any hope?
And again, tape or digital media? I have a computer with a firewire port and don't mind the extra few time to upload a file from a tape...though I have noticed that some HD tape camcorders also have some kind of digital media available.

[budwzr]

Look around for last year's $1500 model. Should be selling around half in this year. I bought a Sony HDR-pj710 a month ago for $720 OTD at Best Buy.