Filled with features, well thought through camcorder, producing remarkable movies.

I used this camcorder for about two weeks. I am very impressed with the quality of the most important features for the digital camcorder.

The color reproduction is excellent unless it's not too dark. The noise level is almost none, again under normal conditions. Specification tells that minimum illumination - 15 lux. I can see that the quality start to degrade noticeably when you have less then 100 watt per 100 square feet (halogen or regular lamps). While it is enough for me, it is certainly far from professional standarts (the price too :-)).

The focusing system is almost flawless. You will hardly find situations when you need to switch to manual, even if you do, fine, manual focusing ring is right on the lens.
The lens has standart size so you can buy third party lens extenders to bump optical zoom to x20 or take wide angle shots. The focusing is not hurt buy using of those.

The controls are handy and obvious. If you have used some video equipment before, you will start taking pictures in 2 minutes after opening the box. Big and clear LCD snaps very well. The camcorder is compact and feels light.

The noise level of the tape mechanism is noticeable but not high (if one would have concern about it there is a socket for external microphone).

The quality of stills is advertised very much, but I did not find it something of extraordinary. Though it's probably better than most other consumer camcorders have, it is still far from the quality of even relatively cheap digital cameras. I compared it to Olympus C3000 and Sony DSC-85.
I did not check quality of MPEG4 movies yet.

The manual might be better, the package is missing 6pin/4pin firewire cable. It's funny, after being so happy with quality while playing on tv from the camcorder, I stuck with the problem of transferring movies to the computer - the feature that everyone would expect to find in digital camcorder. I found it crazy that manual mentions NOTHING about transferring movies from camcorder to computer. It has small article about use of DV (firewire) socket on the camera, while connecting to similar port on VCRs and DVD players/recorders. Included software could be used only for transferring stills. If you connect trough DV port computer does not see the camcorder. So if you need this feature, consider, that you would have to buy additional software to digitally edit movies and burn DVD's. The prices vary a lot. The minimum is about $50. I tried MAXIS "movies to DVD" and WinDVD and Vegas studio, the all easily connect to the camcorder and get movies from it.