Sony DCR-HC62 1MP MiniDV Handycam Camcorder with 25x Optical Zoom

Love this camera for both home movies and still photos. With a 1 gig card it holds over 2k images on high quality. The battery life is excellent, although I still recommend a second battery. The video quality is outstanding for home movies, on board mic pics up sounds great.
I would suggest a case to put this in, as well as extra battery, and plenty of tapes. It has replaced both my digital camera and old camcorder.

A wonderful buy for anyone shooting home video and more.

Really great camcorder for the price. Good vid quality, nightshot for low light. Has a nifty time-lapse mode that can let an entire day pass in a few minutes. The only real down side, IMO, is the lack of a mic input jack.

This camera is easy to use, the battery lasts long enough but I was expecting a better quality picture. I have used it for about 2 weeks, shooting about 60minutes of film. For the price I think it is a good buy. The zoom is great!

this camera is simple, easy to use, and films with great quality. I highly recommend it for any entry level camera purchase.

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3PRFAYV4K81ZL A big part of the reason I bought this camera was for its smooth interval recording (time-lapse) feature. Strangely, Sony's higher end high definition camera HDR-SR5 does not have this feature. I have been quite satisfied with this feature's flexibility and user-friendliness. For some reason, the smooth interval recording has a 12 hour time limit, so if you want to do time lapses longer than 12 hours you have to stop the recording a couple times a day and re-start it and it will go for another 12 hours.

For regular video usage it's a good camera. The 2000x digital zoom, if you haven't guessed, is comically useless (not that I expected anything more). The tele-macro capabilities are pretty impressive.

As others have mentioned, it does not come with a firewire (IEEE 1394) cable that is required if you want to download video to your computer. I knew that before buying it and picked up a standard 4-Pin/6-Pin FireWire cable from Amazon through a third party seller (Phoenixgold) for under $[...] plus shipping, so not a big deal. I could see how that would have been annoying had I been unaware that this cable was not included.

P.S.
The "audio sample in an outdoor environment" clip was shot with an Opteka .43x fisheye converter not included with the camera. Also, the audio was significanly compressed after I uploaded the video so it's not quite what you would hear straight out of the camera.

Edit:
I added a low-light performance test video to youtube (search for "Sony DCR-HC62 low light test"). There is also a higher quality version of that video at http:// albums.phanfare.com/4434655/2011492#imageID=43138119.