I've never owned a camcorder before, so I have nothing to compare this to. But, it's been an overall good experience for me. The "quick start" in the manual had me shooting movies and stills in no time.
**** You'll need to spend another $150 if you want to download movies to your computer - read more below ****
The digital stills are amazing high quality. I had been warned that camcorders don't take very good stills, but these are pretty darn good. I was quickly able to download them to my computer over USB.
The movies are pretty good, and the image stabilization works like a champ. I'm not smart enough to take advantage of some of the more advanced features, but the zoom is smooth and keeps focus fairly well.
Now, about the software: Of course, you'll need to install their USB driver in order to download from the SD card, but the rest of the software is worthless. Don't bother with the ArcSoft software. With the USB connection, you can treat the camera like a removable disk drive and just copy over the pictures. After that, just use your favorite image viewer like IrfanView.
Maybe I'm just an ignorant newbie, but I expected to have everything I needed to download movies from the tape. This isn't the case. First of all, the download is over Firewire so you'll need to buy a Firewire card for your computer and a Firewire cable (if the card doesn't come with a cable). I got one for $50 from Adaptec.
On top of that, you'll also have to buy software to handle the download (the software shipped with the camcorder doesn't support this). You have several options here, and each package comes with its own set of editing tools. I spent $100 for Pinnacle Studio 9, but you have other options, too.
Finally, you need a computer with the horsepower to support the editing tools - and there are some pretty high-end requirements here. You'll need plenty of memory, a fairly fast processor, and a hard drive that can write fast enough to keep up with the tape.
