Canon Vixia HF10

Pros: Really nice video, good manual settings, great image stabilizer!

Cons: AVCHD format limits editing options for Windows users, no eye level viewfinder, no HDMI cable

Summary: The Canon Vixia HF10 is simply a great camcorder for taking great looking video wherever you find yourself. It's very small and easily be slipped into a large pocket. It has a great lens and lots of manual controls, if you're into that. I does not have an adjustment wheel or roller for the manual controls, joystick only, but the interface is intuitive and friendly. For Intel based Macintoshes (Apple does not support AVCHD on PPC Macs), you probably already have what you need to edit the footage from this camera. iMovie '08 will import the footage and convert it to Apple Intermediate Codec so you can edit the footage on the timeline and make Quicktime movies to share on the .mac web gallery, Youtube, AppleTV (720p24 even) etc. The newest versions of Final Cut Express and Final Cut pro (Pro Res 422) also supports AVCHD. PC options are more limited and not as elegant, but they are out there, by all means avoid the bundled software. The HF10 does not record in SD resolutions, so if you're just looking for a cool Youtube camcorder or you're going to be burning your projects to a DVD, you should consider a DV (tape) camcorder or an SD HDD / Flash model that records in Mpeg-2, you'll be much happier. The 16GB built-in storage is nice, but limited. If you're the type of person that likes to shoot video and hook it up to your TV to share and just likes to keep the video on the camcorder, you'll run out of space fast, definitely consider the spacious Sony HDR-SR11. The unit is expandable via SD HC cards, I would recommend getting the fastest ones you can, the bitrate for the best HD video on this camcorder is 17Mbs and you'll need one that can keep up.