This camera is pretty cheap in amazon...499$

it have good features...24mbps recording...20x optical, 1920x1080....

http://camcorder.jvc.com/product.jsp?modelId=MODL028517&pathId=141&page=10

anyone have it ??? I cant find reviews

anyone ???

I just bought one, and so far I have been very happy. In daytime indoor and outdoor lighting conditions the camera works great. Incredibly good clear and crisp picture. In low light it is a little worse for wear, but honestly works better than my old minidv camera.

Personally I wanted a camera without a hard drive, as I wanted to maximize battery life and reduce the likelihood of failure, and I like that this one has 2 SDHC card slots, so it can jump seamlessly from one to the next. I have two 16 GB cards, and it gives about 4 hours of recording time at the standard resolution. There is one higher, but I don't think I will use that often, and 2 steps lower for more recording time at a lower quality.

The unit itself feels decent, it is plastic and a little cheap feeling in some spots. The laser touch controls are a little wonky at first, but I am getting used to them. Not a lot of manual options, but it does have manual focus, although I wish it was a little easier to access (you have to go into a menu to activate it).

All in all so far very happy, filmed my daughter's birthday (mostly indoor) and then an outdoor picnic and volleyball game at the beach, and so far looks amazing. So much better than my old digital but SD minidv camera. Oh, and I love that the files are already basically PC files, just plug in and transfer and you are done.

anyone ???

I got one little more than a month ago.

Basically, it is a good HD camcorder for the price. The unit is nice and compact. It fits to an old camera holster I have that was used for an old film compact camera. Controls are reasonable. It is nice that most buttons are below the display that allows quick access without change your sight. I like that the record button also duplicated at bottom below display. Use the touch buttons allow to reducing shake when start/stop recording (a common problem with thumb trigger).

Not like some other HD camcorder, it does everything in 1080 HD with various encoding rate. It does not have setting for 1440x1080 like Canon does, or 720P mode. The 2 M pixel still is on the low side but it is not the function most people will care about. It does allow take still in the video mode too.

The image stablelizer is less than idea. It is hard to use at maximum zoom. This is partially contributed by its light weight. It also does not have a view finder (most at this class does not, bad for the old guys like me) so I often find myself holding the unit with both hand to get better view angle. This also helped to stable the unit.

The battery life is ok (> 1 hr with standard battery). Two 8 GB SDHC cards I installed also last about that long. I will guess use SDHC is more durable than the HDD. However, I will not call the auto media switch “seamless”. I encounter such only once but it stop the recoding while switching the media. Maybe has something to do with pre-format the card.

The manual settings is little hard to perform a quick change when you needed (Canon does this better). Use laser touch for adjustment is not as precise as buttons or joy stick. I found myself often overshot or under few steps. The LCD screen is particular hard to use for manual focusing even with focus assistant.

Somehow the recording format is not as easy as Canon. Both are in AVCHD (which is a H264) but it is little hard to playback in most PC I tried, with or without hardware acceleration.

My HM200 starts exhibit problem after a month. The focus failed on objects at infinity at maximum zoom (20X). It is good as far as 13-15X. I went back to the old clips I did and found it did not have this problem. It needs a repair. However, I got it new from eBay. So, I need to find out is the warranty will be honored by JVC or not.