I love finding a camcorder that packs in good value as well as good utility, and the Panasonic SDRH80K definitely qualifies on both fronts.

The Panasonic SDRH80K is a sixty gig camcorder with a 70x zoom lens, optical image stabilization to counter your hand shaking over long shots, a function to judge the quality of your scene before shooting, VideoCam Suite software to make uploading easier, a PureColor Engine, Soft Skin mode that makes skin look visibly better and diminishes the appearance of lines and wrinkles (don’t you wish it could actually DO that to your skin, and not just its depiction in digital memory?) and face and scene detection systems.

This comes with more functions than some new cars, but the best part about it is that the camera is designed well, and intuitively, so trying to figure out where everything is shouldn’t be an issue at all.  All the buttons are in easy reach, the zoom is smooth and reads small print at distances of over ten feet away–there’s just not much to complain about on this camera.

Not even the price, which weighs in at a fairly conservative four hundred bucks depending on where you shop.  The Panasonic SDRH80K is a fantastic and easy to use camera that should give you plenty of utility.