AVCHD Digital Camcorder

One of the first AVCHD camcorders available to the consumer public. It has nice features like shooting in 1080 or standard definition, has a 30 gig hard drive, can shoot still photos alone or during taping, lightweight, shoots with Dolby 5.1 audio, HDMI output, and has a large, clear touch screen. The picture when playing from the camcorder through HDMI to a high definition television is phenomenal. It is crystal clear and the camera also has an image stabilizer, Night Shot and Super Night Shot built in. The biggest gripe I have about this camera is that the included software to edit AVCHD video is lacking at best and since it is so new no other programs are currently available to edit the AVCHD format. Also if the video is saved onto DVD in AVCHD format only a Blu-ray player can be used to read the AVCHD DVD. Although you can convert any of the AVCHD to Mpeg-2 format with the included software, you lose the high-definition - so why would you do that? We're basically using this camera to tape our baby as he grows and saving the video to an external harddrive. We hope that in the not to distant future the third party vendors of video editing software (like Adobe) will begin supporting the AVCHD format. Until then we're just saving it all. That's the price of having the latest and greatest I guess.