Hi guys,

I am looking for new digital camcorder. Can anyone recommend me a good one with the links to buy it?

My preferable brands would be sony and panasonic but others are also accepted if you have had good experience with them.

Budget range is £250-£285.

Thanks in advanced

We got a Canon MV830i from ebuyer.com for just over £200. It has DV in as well as out (so you can record back to tape from your computer) and an A-D converter (so you can take any analogue video signal and either record to DV tape or pass straight through to the computer and record as a movie file).

It's not the smallest machine, and is tape rather than DVD or hard-disk but, for the money, it's excellent. Also, it's "last year's model" and the new models are (a) more expensive and (b) don't have the two killer features I mentioned above.

http://ebuyer.com/customer/products/...duct_uid=86759

Do you have a particular subject that you're thinking of regularly videoing, such as airshows - do you need to be able to video very fast moving subjects, for instance?

I just want a simple camcorder that will record and play movies. Well basically for family films etc. It does not have to be very professional camera.

How simple, perhaps a DVD based camcorder is better for you where you record then put straight into dvd player (after finalising).

Or a MiniDV based one. For DV the Panasonic NVGS400B or something like that (don't remember exact model number) is good image quality with three CCDs.

Sony have the HDR-HC3 which does high definition video recording.

Other nice easy ones are the Canon MV series which are probably the simplest to use.

I have a Canon MV600i, you really need good light and the quality, when played back on LCD screens anyway, is dire.

I like the idea of the HDR-HC3, I'm going to take a look at that myself.

I think its an early adopter camera for lack of PC HD disc burners and support from vid-editing software and the power your computer would need in all things graphical.

Have a look at this forum, if you go back through a few pages or use the search facility you will find plenty of discussion and recomendations.

http://www.avforums.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=61

I recently bought a SONY HC42. Really poleased with it and would recomend a SONY.