Personally, I would recommend this one:
http://www.ibuydigital.com/main.cfm?fuseaction=all.proPage&product_id=1075
I bought it from this place and have been very happy with it. It has also gotten good all around reviews. It retails for $899 (at stores like Best Buy and Circuit City and direct from Sony and they almost never go on sale) but this place sells it for $625. It isn’t gray market and it is brand new with full US warranty…
It is a digital 8 camera which isn’t the same as MiniDV but they # of lines of resolution on this one are the same as those on consumer level MiniDV cameras. It is a bit bigger than most MiniDV cameras because it uses the 8mm and high 8 tapes to record digital but it also has a better optical focus than any of the smaller cameras and is loaded down with features including a mega-pixel camera (with included memory card) which is sort of nifty. It has a 3.5 inch flip out screen and the battery life on what it comes with will run you for about 2 hours in daylight use with conservative use of the optical zoom although you can get batteries for it that will give it nearly ten hours of running time. (I can tell you where to get those for about 30% off retail as well) The tapes which hold the same amount of information as the MiniDVs are also a lot cheaper at about 60% of the price). It is also backwards compatible with High8 and 8mm tapes if you have anything you’ve recorded from an older camera and it offers digital pass-through with the firewire connection to convert these older tapes to digital. Oh, and it also comes with a nifty remote.
Like I said, it is a little larger than the ones that you can nearly cup in one hand but as a result it is a lot easier to keep steady when filming and allows for controls to be more intuitively placed. It also does very well in low light conditions and has the good old green tinted nightspot for use in total darkness. You can spend less for a MiniDV camera of lesser overall quality or more to get one with some of the features that this camera has but personally, I’ve been very happy with this one. I set out to buy a MiniDV camera until I started reading horror stories about a lot of the models that I considered to be in my price range. I really liked the features of this camera and realized that it would cost me at least $1200 to get *most* of these features and equivalent quality in a MiniDV. When I found it at this price, it was a done deal.
Here is a link to all the info on it at Sony’s website:
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INT...cc&CatalogCategoryID=p_AKC0.NTa8AAADx6JRwgaDa
P.S.
Regardless of what you think you want, don’t pay any attention outrageous #s when it comes to “digital zoom”. You’ll see cameras that offer as much as 700% digital zoom. It isn’t a zoom at all; all it does is crop the view smaller and blow up the picture. At 700% digital zoom you are looking at blurry blocks move across your viewfinder when you are trying to film people.
