Total Newbie Question

[Dave Wishart]

My and the SWMBO are going on our delayed honeymoon in September (cruise around Alaska glaciers) and I'm looking for a camcorder (< £1000 but ideally closer to £500 if possible) to record the event and anything that might occur in the future.

I'm reasonably au fait with technology so it doesn't need to be especially simple to get to grips with. If it helps I will be upgrading my home cinema kit to HD (plasma & ps3) later this year.

Apart from image quality I don't really know what I should be looking for so I'm looking for models to start and compare with.

Thoughts ?

davemcwish

[A n d r e w]

Most of the consumer offerings from Panasonic, Sony, Canon are available to you for the kind of money you're talking. Usual logic applies: the more you pay, the more you get. Try to buy the largest sensor you can afford. Most high definition offerings record AVCHD (a variant of H.264) to memory card or hard drive, but there are still a few HDV (tape-based) camcorders around - the Canon HV40, for example - though they're becoming few and far between (with Panasonic never having offered an HDV camcorder and Sony not bringing out a new HDV model along with the rest of this season's line up).

Main bottle-neck with AVCHD is editing. Needs major computing grunt. But the PS3 is a great match for AVCHD video and BD discs, so you might get away with minimal editing.

Here're a few I'd be interested in if I was in the market (arranged alphabetically):
Canon HF S100
Panasonic TM300
Sony XR520

All three of the major players offer less expensive options, too.