Salutations

. I'm helping a mate to decide which camcorder to get. He's after a decent high def digital camera, budget around £600. Preferably it will have an sd card slot, good editing software, work well in low-light conditions, reasonable battery life, image stabiliser and a still image function. My benchmark is the Canon HF10 (£608 @ Aamazon). For this price, can the HF10 be beaten or not? Any and all recommendations are appreciated. Thank you.
Hi.
As a HF10 owner first let me say the HF10 is a very good choice and will do well for all the above although it doesn't come with "decent" editing software.
But i would say go for the cheaper HF100.
My reason for saying this other than cost is that while its nice to have 16GB built in i find i use SD cards only these days. To get the footage off the camera you have to hook it up to your computer AND the mains. You just cant do it on battery.
I find this very inconvenient at home so i just take the SD card out and put it in my PC.
Your friend might not mind doing this and im sure a lot of others dont either. Just pointing out my only disappointment with mine.
Other than that IQ is great, lowlight isnt bad (and a lot better than some), focusing is fast and accurate, OIS works well, a good selection of manual control if you want it and audio recording is good (and it has manual level control)