Hi all,
Thought I'd share with you something I only found out recently. I had been using my old Sony DCR-PC5 camcorder for years, in a helmet camera setup to film my ATV rides. Recently I had an "incident" in which the PC5 did not survive... So I went shopping for a new camcorder to use with my bullet camera, but it appears that many camcorders nowadays do not have support for a LANC remote control or even A/V IN connections. That really blows because I need both and so do a lot of people who use their camcorders for helmet cams. After much surfing and reading a lot of forum posts, I found out that the new Sony camcorder actually pretty much all have native support for LANC and A/V IN but just don't have the required jacks installed on them for some reaso (probably to save a couple bucks manufacturing!)...
But then I found a company who makes an adapter cable which connects to the new Sony camcorders via the weird D-shaped connector, and lets you hook up a LANC remote AND gives you RCA jacks to hook up the external camera and mic. It's not cheap $50 but works like a charm http://www.prolanc.com I found mine on eBay and saved a few bucks. I use it with my brand new HDRCX12 and it works as advertized. I already owned the LANC remote but otherwise you have to get one of these too but they're fairly cheap. If you don't want to use it with a helmet cam, the cable will also control the camcorder directly in camera mode, pretty neat!