I own a Panny GS400, and it totally rocks. It's a little expensive for a "consumer" cam (lists for $1500 or so, but you can find cheaper), but it comes with a TON of pro features like: 3 CCDS each with a decent size chip (bigger than typical consumer cams, 3 bigger CCDs make a HUGE difference IMO), manual override for everything if you want it (manual focus, manual zoom, manual white balance, manual aperture/exposure, manual speed, etc. all through a neat "multi-purpose" jog-ring around the lens), a seperate mini mic-in for audio (for this board, that might sound cheesy on the audio front, but you'll be hard-pressed to even get audio in at all on most consumer cams, and it had three modes: AGC, Manual with limiting, and Manual), AE Lock (which freakin' rules, just stay in automode, frame your shot, then switch to AE Lock to ensure everything stays put the way you want it to), TRUE widescreen NTSC that uses a larger area on the CCD chips (not scaled or zoomed, watch out for that because a lot, and I mean MOST, consumer "widescreen" cams just crop and zoom or mask to letterbox, this cam doesn't do any of that crap), and finally, it has OPTICAL image stabalization (which also freagin' totally rules compared to most consumer cams that use electronic stabalization, I can't even tell you how much true perfect optical stabalization rules). Anyway, thought I'd make a plug for that cam because I personally own one, and on many levels it almost is on par with much higher-end prosumer cams like the GL/XL series (not quite I know, but in some areas it's actually better) for less than half the price and more than half the physical size. There are other GS-series Panny cams that are cheaper with less features but still are pretty nice too, but the GS400 is a masterpiece as far as consumer cams go (although as with any gadget, it does have some minor annoyances here and there, but overall, that was $1500 very well spent as far as I am concerned. You can find a ton of info from actual hands-on users about these Panny cams here:
http://www.pana3ccduser.comAnd if you want to see some examples of footage caught with the GS400 (remember these are highly compressed for the Web, so they don't even come close to showing you the true quality of the DV this thing caps), check out some of my blog posts here:
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-- Taint