Hey everyone, I'm looking for a good camera for a friend of mine and I myself have been using the HV20 for a long time for a wide variety of purposes and I've always really loved it. Now, my friend is looking for a lower budget solution but it only has to be really suitable for vlogging. Can someone recommend me a sub-$500 camera that doesn't necessarily do HD but just has an SD picture quality and sound quality somewhat comparable to the HV20? Thx!

Oh forgot to mention the most important part:
COMPATIBILITY: must work with normal USB (not firewire) and have a file format that's pretty compatible with Vegas/Premiere and all and not one of those messed up proprietary things.

Why not get an HV20? Refurbished at tigerdirect.com for $400. Just got mine.

Well, that'd mean also having to log in footage via firewire... I'm hoping to find something that stores the stuff in internal memory in a format that can be accessed via USB and isn't anything proprietary that can't just be dragged into Vegas.

Most of those will be avchd which will be harder on your computer than hdv. I'd say if you aren't going all out hdv is WAY easier. Just hook up firewire and capture.