Canon Optura 200MC

Summary: This purchase was a DV upgrade from a Sony TRV8 for better picture quality from optical image stabilization and low light white balance. I sent the camera back because it had extreme jaggies in the picture. I really wanted to like this camera but it was definitely not an improvement in image quality. I have no doubt that the jaggies disappear at the lower resolution of NTSC encoding in VHS but I did not have the time to determine if Mpeg 2 compression for DVD's would eliminate the jaggies. Before I retured it I wanted to see if the Sony 120BT was better (since I did want something portable like my TRV8). I played in the store with a number of cameras and I came to the conclusion that the megapixels being added for the still shots is degrading video picture quality. There were jaggies on the LCD screen of the 120BT as well. Bottom line is that I am sticking with my TRV8 and when the video camera manufacturers get tired of playing around with trying to make a camera to take stills and surf the web, act as a telephone and everything else then I will get a new camera. If you want good video quality you may find that some of the lower resolution (just enough for the 530 lines of DV), large CCD cameras without memory sticks work better. I may be looking for a older Sony TRV900. It is slightly large but it had three large low resolution CCDs, with good low light sensitivity and it had optical image stabilization.