Gratefull for the Gift

We had a baby last year and are just out of college so we couldn't afford to buy our own camcorder. We were starting to save money and look at camcorders around Christmas because we hated not being able to record all the precious moments of our baby girl. My husband happened to mention to his dad that we were trying to save and buy a camcorder and when we went home for Christmas, they surprised us with this one. It was such a generous gift and I am very grateful for their generosity. I love having this camcorder and enjoy using it however there are a couple of things that I would change if I could. The main feature being that sometimes, when you are trying to capture a moment with a baby, you turn the camera on and you can hear the disc spinning and you have to wait for a while before you can actually record. Many times, by the time we can actually record, we have missed the moment. In the beginning we didn't realize how long it took for the disc to get ready to record that we thought we were recording great footage and then when we're done and pressed the button, it started recording after the fact. And the bad thing about it is you can't rewind and record over top of footage you don't want like you can on the tape recorders. But the good thing about the DVD camcorders is you can put the mini dvd disk right in your DVD player and watch your family videos. It is also easy to hook the camera up to the computer or TV to watch. The feature for taking digital pictures is not all that great. Those photos turn out pretty grainy and you're better of with a regular digital camera for still footage.
The camera itself is a nice size and I like the viewing screen. The lens cover slides up and down and so sometimes it's easy to forget to put slide the cover back up since it's not obviously dangling off a string like on most camcorders, but that's easy to get used to. I've heard people complain about the joystick being awkward to use, but I haven't had a problem with it and find it easy to use. It comes with 2 batteries which is nice and the camera case is nice as well.