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There is so much innovation in high-def camcorders, its hard to buy. Just when I thought the Canon HF-10 was the right one, I see two new announcements:

• Panasonic HDC-SD100. They are three-CMOS imaging systems. Available September 2006. It adds a focus ring, better image stabilization. They have a viewfinder too. The SD100 records to SD cards while the HS-100 records to a 60GB hard drive.
• Sony HDR-CX12 which captures AVCHD to MemoryStick Dyuo. It is like the HDR-SR12 which is hard disk based and performed very well compared with the Canon HF-10 and is bout the same size. Sony includes a memory card though and both are $900. HF100 records at 17Mbps peak and this one at 16Mbps. So it is really quite comparable. Should be available in early August. Blu-ray is 18Mbps peak compression, so it seems like we are at some sort of limit now.
• JVC-HD10. The HD40 has a 120GB hard drive, the HD30 has 80GB and they can also record video to a microSDHC card. They can record in MPEG-2TS or AVCHD. Also the compression is variable rate so even a 5Mbps average can peage at 18Mbps. The HD40 is $1300 MSRP

• Sanyo Xacti HD1010. This is an ultracompact that also is 1080i. It records in SDHC in AVCHD. It ships in July.

  Net, net, the HF100 seems like the camcorder to beat and new flash format is pretty nice, so we are moving to the right time to buy an HD camcorder. The big disadvantage though is the SR-12 is MemoryStick Pro so is non standard. It does have a viewfinder though, so it or Panasonic could be perfect. The other one could be the JVC which is the most flexible thing possible.