Bought a Camcorder

i bought a Sony camcorder HC21E recently. i love this little garget because of the following features,

1 Have viewfinder - Increase battery runtime

2 Have threaded lens - Able to mount filter, wide angle, ..., etc, able to extend features.

3 All connection socket are on the body - Having the experience of charing mobile phone, you may find that the frequently action of plugging and unplugging would lead to connection intermittent or fail at all, in around a year.

4 Use mini DV - i don't want DVD because of 3 reasons. First, 8 cm DVD can only store half an hour quality video, compared with mini DV to keep an hour excellent quality video. Second, having seen the review from www.dvspot.com i understood that it is difficult to deliver the stored DVD video for editing. My friend has a Sony DVD camcorder, he was puzzled how to convert IFO format into MPEG or AVI. He may need to buy a conversion program from web some time. Third, the chassis design is a bit larger then that for mini DV.
i also don't want micro drive and harddisk because their life seems shorter than those using mini DV.

5 With slim design

The purchasing process had taken quite a while:-

i had the experience of operating the first generation of Sony camcorder (i don't remember the model number). At that moment, i loved its compact size, and the sound recording capability. Before the generation of mini DV, i had operated some older using V8 with directional sound recording feature - when a loud sound appear at a direction, it supresses the sound of surrounding that direction, it is awful.

i had also seen my friend operating a Fujisu camcorder, but was out of function in a year, so i don't have confidence to use Fujisu camcorder.

During the buying process, i have checked with different salespersons from different shops on different models from Sony, JVC, Panasonic, SamSung. Based on the above reasoning, i rejected JVC's micro drive version. For my subjective quanlity favourite, i rejected SamSung. The 3 CCD version of Panasonic seems a good choice, but the chassis is not slim enough, so i chose Sony mini DV.

The HC series contains many versions, i like 21E because it has all the connection sockets, including IEEE 1394, USB and Video output, on the body; plus the 'feature' of no Memory Stick slot. For the products of digital camera (DC) and digital video recorder at present, i still cannot find a good affordable digital camcorder which can be slim and small enough to work as both DC and video recorder. Therefore the 0.8 Mega pixels is enough for video recording purpose, i won't use it to capture image, so the proprietary Memory Stick Duo slot is not worth to be included in.