Video Camera recommendations

[Wizard]

In about a month my girlfriend and I will be leaving for Cost Rica. I will be taking all my camera gear, but I also would like to have a nice video camera. Can anyone recommend something that has a good size zoom, good image stabilizer, good for low light, and no more than 400 dollars? Any help would be great, thanks in advanced.

[Jon]

There's this little-known company called "Canon" that makes some fairly good stuff. Seriously, the ZR-80, ZR-85, ZR-90 or Elura 60 should fill the bill. The ZRs are pretty compact, and have 18-22x digital zoom and IS.

[Andy_T]

I have a Panasonic NV DS 65 that might be in this price range if you get a good offer. It has 800 K pixels, stabilizer, lamp and miniDV system and makes very good pictures.

The only problem it has is that it is *very* cumbersome to transfer the videos to your PC once you've made them. I used it about 5 times when I bought it and never since.

If you don't have a dedicated MPG encoding card (e.g. Pinnacle 500 or Canopus Storm that sell for about $300 used or $1000 new), or a DVD recorder with line-in possibility, then you'll take about an hour to transfer 15 minutes to your PC (and having a really fast PC doesn't help much here) and a night of computation to have an hour of video rendered in MPG. Firewire transfer is ok, but saving and rendering takes a lot of time.

So ... my advice would be to spend a bit more and get one of those cameras that use DVD-Rs. They do all the encoding for you, you just have to watch or edit them on your PC.

Best regards,
Andy