Digital Camcorders

I need some help on selecting a digital camcorder. Any suggestions would be appreciated, my budget is no more than $1000, and the use will primarily be recording drives, and taking stills. I have been considering these two Panasonic models:

SDR-S100

PV-GS500

Does anyone have any experience with these or know of anything better in the same price range. How long until these things are obsolete?

Thanks,

Chris

 

I bought a Sony DCR-SR100 a few months ago and have been happy with it. It has a 30gig internal hard drive that will hold something like 6 hours of high quality video and it's really easy to plug into USB and download directly to my laptop. For taking still pics it takes 3.x megapixel pics which look good.... it takes excellent low light pics with the "night shot" feature turned on. Battery life is good, close to two hours of continous video.

The only time I have noticed a problem was one time while on a rather high speed drive I wedged the camera between the dash and windshield and after a bit hard drive showed an interuption due to excessive vibration. The video wasn't interupted but it would seem that it would probably be good to use some padding if you are going to mount it in a car somewhere vibration prone. Never had that problem when holding it.....

It goes for just under $1k at retailers and slightly cheaper on Amazon

 

Thanks for the info Mark, I'm quite aloof when it comes to things like cameras and camcorders. It seems like any time I buy something like this a month later a better version comes out and I'm stuck with clunky outdated thing.

 

I really knew nothing about it.... Just read a bunch of reviews on Amazon and probably saw magazine blurb or something. Then the girl I was dating at the time hinted that I should go ahead and get it so I did Have you looked at the reviews of camcorders on Amazon?

If you are looking for a still camera I highly recomend the new Canon EOS Rebel XTi...... 10.x megapixels of SLR goodness I'm still not sure how to use most of the features yet but so far it is an awesome camera.