HD-There is no substitute

I was in the market for a new camcorder. I thought my Hi8 lasted me a good 10 years and it was about time. I tend to buy the best available when I do buy because I know I won't buy again for a while. I didn't want to spend $3000 plus on a professional model, so the best available was the Sony HDR-SR1. It offers a 30 GB Hard Drive and 1080i recording. It uses the AVCHD format instead of HDV. The benefit is that it can record HD content into a smaller file size, thus using less space. I've been very happy with the picture quality. HD truly blows SD out of the water. I hook it up to my TV via HDMI. In low light conditions, the picture can get grainy. You can use the Nightvision, which really works well, but it puts a green cast over everything (think the Paris Hilton video).
The camera uses CMOS instead of traditional CCDs. I have not been able to see a difference between Sony's CMOS and Panasonic's 3 CCD cameras. The CMOS uses less energy which is beneficial because I can get more recording time from the battery. The Carl Zeiss lens tends to give accurate reproductions of the colors. All in all I have been very happy with this camera.
Now for the bad. The video format AVCHD isn't supported by any of the major video editing programs. I use Vegas 6 to edit video and then burn to DVD using DVD Architect 3. Vegas, which is a Sony program will be coming out with and update (the website says spring 2007) for AVCHD support. While this is good news for me, this won't help any of the thousands of people who use Adobe or some other video editing software.