I see a lot of Sony talk around here. the more I research trying to find out what I want, the less I know it seems.

I want a camcorder primarily to film band gigs......so low light and sound are my main priority........then I want to edit somewhat[shortening and picking bits out of the whole, mostly] and apply them to a website for the band.......so that makes me lean more toward the minidvd format.......the rest would be gravy........family stuff.......more gigs.......but primarily music to archive and music to be applied on web pages.

During my research, I was looking at the Hitachis.......haven't seen you mention them.......I Have a Canon digital camera but reviews say the mechanism is noisy, so I tended to want to opt out there.......JVC has been anecdotally diss'd for poor reliability.......Sony is always good.......I guess.......then there are Panasonic and Samsung and Sanyo and Mustek and a host of others.......

As an aside, I had a kodak z-730 which took awesome video, but it kept not working so I finally took it back after it failed after a warranty repair.......seems it didn;t want to use the rechargeable batteries.......maybe I got a lemon....