Need Help Finding a good Camcorder

[PyroMan99]

Hello Everyone! I am new to the forums and was needing some help finding a good camcorder that will fit my needs.

Just recently we had our older Sony Handycam stolen so we are in the market for a new camcorder. My dad and I will be sharing one. He wants it to be easy to use and good for taking home videos. I will be using it to make small videos with such as special effect videos. I have made a list with two catagories. A "Must Have" catagory and a "Would like to have" catagory. I want to find a camera with all of the Must haves and as many as the 'Would likes' as possible but still be in our budget. We are looking to spend in the ballpark of $800 give or take ~$150 and with black friday coming up and Christmas sales we were hoping that we could get a nice one for a little cheaper than usual.

Our Sony Handycam recorded to Mini DVDs we thought this would be nice but they only held 30min worth of video and we always were having to switch the DVDs out with a new one. This really got in the way when recording things like a wedding or recital. We would really like something that makes it very easy to transfer the videos to a computer but hold a longer duration of video without having to switch what ever it is out.

Here are my two categories


MUST HAVES
- A jack for an external microphone
- Normal video format, nothing weird or proprietary i.e. AVI, Mpeg, etc.
- Easy to transfer the videos to the computer for editing. We prefer to not have to buy extra hardware to transfer media to the computer
- Video compatable with editing softwares such as Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects
- Optical Zoom
- Remote for the camera
- Auto-focus


WOULD LIKES
- External monitor jack
- Able to 'stream' to the computer ( kinda like a really nice webcam)
- manual focus mode
- High Definition mode ( as long as the quality is good I really dont care if it is HD or not. If it has an HD mode that would be nice though)
- Video out port for watching videos on the T.V. directly through the camera


All the help appreciated,
PyroMan99

[Moontrash]

price point?

[edDV]

Consider HDV format. It shoots SD DV (4:3 or 16:9) or HD (16:9). Both DV and HDV modes use IEEE-1394 (Firewire) for data transfer. A useful bonus feature, HDV camcoders can shoot HDV to tape but downconvert to DV format in the camera for transfer. HDV cams can live stream as DV or HDV format. Budget camcorder of choice Canon HV20/30/40 (matches all your features) or selected Sony models. Higher end Prosumer or Pro models are available.

Other option is AVCHD which has significant editing issues. Also, AVCHD cams don't stream live except as uncompressed HDMI which requires special hardware to capture. See my other threads for details.