I'm a high school student and just spend the last several months filming my school's marching band, as well as a couple of other small projects. Currently I have a Sony HDR-HC1 and I'm looking at getting another camcorder soon so I can do multicam shoots (leave one zoomed out on the marching band to get the form and then zoom in with the other one in order to get individual sections or players). I'm trying to keep my budget down fairly low (not any higher than $800).

I would like to get an HV20 because of the better low-light performance (which is crucial because the marching band will often warm up in very very dim conditions before they perform at competitions) but I'm not sure whether or not the picture quality will be so different from the HDR-HC1 that the two wouldn't edit together very well.

So what do you guys suggest for doing a multicam shoot? Another HDR-HC1 or an HV20?

I have both. There are color differences and image quality differences but these can be color corrected in post (if you have some time to tinker around). The differences aren't huge but they are there anyway. The benefits of multicam outweigh these color variations between cameras. Just be sure to keep the settings similar. Don't let the other camera drop the shutter to 1/25 while the other is 1/50 etc.

Biggest differences between hv20 and hc1 are that the hv20 is a lot harder to control (worse manual controls), it's mic isn't as good but it has a progressive image. Rolling shutter effect seems to be slightly worse on the hv20. Low light isn't necessarily better (the hv20 seems better because using progressive mode it has a gamma curve that is more beneficial to low light and it lowers shutter to 1/25). If you take your hc1 to 1/25 shutter and white balance (don't let the camera cut too much light trying to white balance automatically) you get very close to the lowlight capability of the hv20.

But I'd say get the hv20 just to see how it looks like :)