And back to the topic of tape vs. flash card. Someone told me you get a better picture using tape? Due to compression? Any clarification on that?
In terms of consumer HD camcorders, tape-based record in HDV, and SSD/HDD/Flash Card based record in AVCHD. AVCHD is a form of H.264 encoding, HDV is a form of MPEG-2 encoding.
Now, H.264 is
theoretically a better codec. If you turn up all the fancy settings it can achieve better image quality at the same bitrate as HDV, all other things considered. HOWEVER, remember that the encoding of both of these is done in camera. The encoding hardware chips need to be cheap, small, cool, low-power and be capable of encoding the footage in real time. The more fancy H.264 encoding settings you use to improve the quality, the more processing power is required to encode the footage in real time. MPEG-2 based codecs require less processing power. Which means that, certainly for the first few generations of AVCHD camcorders, the image quality was actually inferior, because the encoding chips were technically limited and so quality was sacrificed for the ability to encode in real time. Also the max bitrate was lower (17Mbps vs 25Mbps) in the first couple of gens, but IIRC even the HF11 (AVCHD @ 24Mbps) looked worse than the HV20 (HDV @ 25Mbps). I'm not sure if it has evened out yet, it definitely will one day, as the computers in the cameras get better and faster.
Remember H.264-based codecs also requre more computer processing power to process afterwards, AVCHD especially.
Personally I'd get a HV20/HV30/HV40 (All the same, just with a couple of added features). Tape-based HDV, but I've yet to find a more recent cam that matches all of its features and with the same price & image quality, especially in low-light.