Canon HG10

Pros: The camera is compact and the video looks great in the view-finder window.

Cons: - Battery life is so-so
- Canon editing software is awful and incompatible with most other software
- Good luck editing and viewing your videos on Windows without a complex codec download.
- Hard drive was broken out of the box.

Summary: I bought the camera a week before the birth of my son. I have had great experiences with Canon products and spent hours reviewing the various comments on the HG 10. I had little doubt the camera would work perfectly out of the box. Instead, my hard-drive cannot speak to my computer. This is a hardware problem that Canon has informed me it "may or may not fix" depending on the decision of a technician. Of course, this assumes I'm willing to send in my camera for servicing, which would leave me without a camera to film the first weeks of my son's life. So I am stuck transferring all images to my SD card in order to download them to my computer...
... which is an exercise in utter futility. The Canon editing software is absolute garbage. Windows Media Player and Moview Maker are incapable of reading the Canon .mts files. This means that I have been unable to view or show my video on anything other than the camera viewfinder window. I have hours of great movies of my son (well, I think they're great) and can't show them to my friends and family. I have done an exhaustive search to find the right codec to fix this problem and have come up dry. The only working codec I found was sitting on a site with a Soviet flag waving in the corner - Trojans, anyone? Canon is of absolutely no help - they have no codec for Windows on their download page for the HG 10!
I have purchased my last Canon product. I was preparing to buy a Rebel SLR and switched to the Nikon after my frustrations with the HG 10. I hope at some point in the future to be able to use the videos I have taken of my son, but I am not holding my breath.