budget.

Canon HV40 and Sony HDR-HC9.

"Best" is a relative term. Because of the higher compression and higher storage costs for flash memory and hard disc drive consumer camcorders, digital tape continues to be "best".

But there's a new population out there who thinks digital tape is not digital, does not understand the negative impacts of AVCHD compression and cannot see the artifacts left by same.

DV and HDV do have limitations - and the tape drive mechanism can provide issues. 63 minutes of HDV on a standard 60 minute tape is short in comparison to the many hours flash memory and hard disc drive camcorders can save... so there are trade-offs to be made. Since hard disc drives are electromechanical, given a choice between then and hard disc drive cams, the HDD cam fall off the short list.

When computer and camcorder hard drives fail and enough people find a need for RAID1 storage, maybe something will happen.

I with you - I am a tape person and DV/HDV is still king... That said, when camcorders can affordably provide "ultra-high definition" (anything past 1080 - in my book) they need to be worth a look (assuming the editing and playback environment it there, too). While Red and Silicon Imaging are known for this, the Canon EX series is doing some very interesting work. Now to bring that to the $1,000 range... Everyone with RAID1 (too much data to transmit and store in the cloud) and robust video editing hardware and software to support that, then we're good to go.

In the meantime, AVCHD and lack of archival for the unknowing consumer masses. Oh well.

There's always dSLR high definition video...