Since our video camera pooped out after only 20 minutes of the kids' Christmas Pagent last night, we have resigned ourselves to the fact that we are going to have to buy a new video camera.

We want to get a DV camera so that we can burn DVDs for the grandparents.

Please send recommendations.

You might check out this thread (http://mousepad.mouseplanet.com/showthread.php?threadid=19749)

I'm very excited to report that Doc's Canon Optura Xi (http://www.canondv.com/opturaxi/) arrived last week. I paid just around $1000 for it online. (The customer service of the place I got it was a little strange, not exactly the most pleasant experience I've had shopping online, but the price was very good and it's here.)

We haven't really used it much since Doc's been on stupid business trips, but playing around with it he's happy with it so far. Someone Doc knows said that they'd heard that pictures came out red-looking on a Optura Xi. Doc had it on auto-something and yes, it looked a little red, so he pushed an adjustment button two times and now the color looks fine. :rolleyes: It wasn't that hard.

In the other thread I gave the main reasons Doc picked this camera are:

it's more of a hybrid of a digital still camera and a digital camcorder. It's a 2 megapixel camera. It will let us connect our old Sony Hi-8 Camcorder to our computer and convert our hi-8 tapes to DVD. The memory isn't the Sony memory stick and we like the flexability of that. Plus SD cards have a higher memory capacity than smart media and memory sticks.

I was raised in a Nikon household, so having two Canon cameras now feels a little odd but we've been pretty happy so far.

Adrienne