I would highly recommend this camera to anyone who is in the market for a camcorder. I purchased the optura 300 several months ago and have been utilizing it heavily ever since. The camera takes excellent movies of both indoor and outdoor events. I could not be happier with my choice. I did purchase a longer-lived battery which has worked out well. I keep the standard battery charged as a backup, but the larger battery has never died on me even during days that I shot a significant amount of footage.
I would like to point out of few issues I have had with it:
1) The instruction manual leaves much to the imagination, especially with how to download the recorded motion pictures onto a PC. There are many other gaps in the manual.
2) This camera is not for the technologically challenged. I would guess that this is not limited to this specific camera, but is an issue with the entire class of cameras. To burn DVDs and do any kind of editing, the user must have a video capture card & firewire installed on their PC. In addition, downloading movies onto a PC requires LOTS of hard drive space. I installed a 2nd hard drive for this purpose. In addition I needed to install a DVD RW drive so I could burn DVDs. I also upgraded my RAM. Although all of these are easy installs in newer PC's, it can be a daunting task just for a person to figure out what is actually needed not to mention knowing how to actually install it. Combined with shortcomings in the manual, I could see this being fatal for some users. If you are technologically challenged, I would recommend the cameras that burn directly to DVD.
3) At the extreme end of the zoom, the camera seems to have trouble focusing and is very shaky. This is not that big of an issue as long as the user keeps this in mind while framing the video.
4) I am not really happy with the quality of the still images captured by this camera. These images can be saved onto a flash card or onto the digital tape. With perfect lighting, the images are good, but I have found that when the flash is needed, the images are completely over exposed. The red-eye reduction feature does not work at all to reduce red eye.
Please do not let these negatives taint my review. I love this camera but I wanted to put all the issues that I have found with it out there.