Do as Bairda says. The Canon's are pretty nice, nice big sensor so you have enough light (well more than the cheaper around there for $250). Any camera will record nice outside when the sun shines. But when it's night and you're in your living room with all the lights on, most consumer camera's don't record that nice. So the canon probably will do better. Also you can adjust a lot manually. It's HD. It's HDV, so no AVCHD and converting that into AIC (which FCE will do). Most consumer camcorder have AVCHD but it's too compressed to edit natively, so it always get converted with mac edit packages (iMovie, FCP FCE).