Agreed that everything is out of date quickly however I see no reason to buy a standard definition camcorder anymore. The Canon HF10 is an excellent choice and if you check on camcorderinfo.com they have very high opinions of the Canon line.
I have had experience with tape, sdhc card, burn to DVD and hard drive camcorders. I strongly recommend using sdhc cards and I'll tell you why:
1. Capacity/cost is no longer an issue, I bought one for $8 that gives me 40 minutes of highest resolution (4gb) from
Amazon. They have up to 32gb now.
2. Flash cards are very durable and extremely compact.
3. Copying the files to a computer for backup (or to external hard drive) is very fast and easy.
You can't play scenes from a tape and you have to copy it to a computer which takes the same amount of time as in recording it. I had a Hitachi that burned directly to DVD, after one play the DVD went bad (thankfully I had backed it up first). Hard drives are ok but they can fail and don't handle motion as well as solid state sdhc cards. Some automatically turn off if jiggled too much, so how do you film an extreme ride?
I used to back up my movies on DVD's. This was expensive, very time consuming and they took up a lot of space. Now with sdhc cards all my movies are in one directory on the computer and also backed up on two external hard drives. Since the sdhc cards are so inexpensive now I don't erase them. I may be going too far but family memories are very precious to me and the effort is minimal with the new technologies we have. I do store one of the hard drives at a box in my bank as well.
I was an early adopter of the HD camcorders and bought a Panasonic SD1, was blown away by the quality and can't imagine how much better the newest models must be. Got it at Amazon.com here in the USA for $750, interestingly the price seemed to change every day and it ranged from $750 to $2,000!
