URGENT; 6 wks to buy a camcorder..

[marcaaron20]

I have bout 6 weeks left to get meself a digital camcorder for the 15th Dec, I need some help and pointing in the right direction, this is rough spec; (I'm new to camcorders and photography so bare with me)

Record onto either harddrive or dvd (harddrive prob being best option)
Battery to last bout 3 or more hrs on 1 full charge (cos will be wanting to record all the gig, obviously)
A good digital and optical zoom
To be able to connect upto PC or DVD recorder to put the recording onto DVD and stuff
A nice compact size
A screen so that I know when i'm pointing

any other features, please add..

suggestions, comments, reviews on various camcorders or reviews of your own camcorders will be great

As I say it is urgent..

Thankyou for your time,

 

[mhku]

I doubt a single battery will last for 3 hours continuous use but you can buy spare batteries and some cameras take larger batteries. And if you're filming in the dark consider an external light source.

My brother recently bought a Sony camcorder that records to a hard drive (soryy, don't know the model)- think it had a 48x optical zoom (digital will degrade the picture).

I'm sure if you google "digital camcorder reviews" you'll find a few sites.