I recently purchased a Canon HG-10 camcorder. The primary reason was to start capturing Jocelyn's growth on video; she's almost walking now, and we wanted to get some video of our families through the Christmas holiday.

The camcorder is extremely light. It records directly to hard disk instead of MiniDV using the AVCHD codec. The 40GB hard drive at 15Mbps (highest quality) will store about 5.5 hrs of video - while the standard battery only lasts about an hour (the extended batter lasts a little more than two).

Unfortunately this codec is so new (only out this year, AFAICT) that very little video editing software or even player software exists. Even on Fedora 8 I can't play the .mts files (VLC comes close, but no cigar). Hopefully the underlying libraries that Cinelerra, Xine, mplayer, VLC, and others use will be updated soon to support the codec. In the mean time I guess I'll just hook the camcorder up to the TV.