I don't know if I had lower expectations that some of the other reviewers but I am very pleased with this camera. Sure, the stills photos are not very good, the lamp is not worth using and under dull light the image is a bit grainy. However, I don't think these things are unusual for a consumer camera and quite normal at this price point. Under reasonable indoor light the image quality is great in HD and the touch screen makes the camera a doddle to use. I wanted an easy to use, point-and-shoot camera and for that it does the job very well. When on certain image qualities there is some audible clicking noises which is clearly a design fault, but apart from that I can't fault it and for the price I think it is excellent value for a HD camcorder.
Two things you might want to consider:
1) This unit does not come with any memory cards so you need to buy one to use this camcorder (Around £11 for 8 GB).
2) As this camera shoots in HD, editing video on my mid-end PC is impossible in real time. My computer just is not fast enough to decode the heavy compression, and I understand this is normal for editing HD video from this type of file format. You can either edit the video without being able to watch it while you edit, or you can convert the video to a lower resolution format such as MPEG-2 which used in DVDs. The output looks great on my Sony HD TV via an HDMI cable directly from the camera so it is clearly just the PC.
