I have the task of recommending a camcorder for an educational department at my job. Almost all the people that would depend on this camera have limited A/V knowledge. I'd like to get a HDD Camcorder for them that is the easiest to operate it terms of:

1. Playback from camera - easily hook the camera up to HDTV and easily find files to playback.
2. Copy files to shared drive for playback over network.

Right now people give me thier DV tapes and I log, record and encode their video and throw everything into a shared drive/dvd. What I'd like to do is buy a camcorder that would reduce this workload. But from what I've been reading, AVCHD might not be there yet.

Question: When you hit record on a camera that records to HDD and then stop - is that one AVCHD file?

What I'd like to do is make a Procoder 3 watch folder on a shared drive. A person could use the camera then dump their footage into the watch folder and then Procoder would make nice mp4s/flvs... is AVCHD that easy? Can I set up the camera at some SD setting that takes up less space? Is there a camera that you can just plug into XP and XP sees the computer just like an external HD?

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Hi Jason,

I've got a Sony SR11 and its easy to use. Point and shoot with manual override. Playback to HDTV is easy if the HDTV has an HDMI connection and selecting shoots is easy although your navigation will be shown on screen. What you see on the camera's touch screen is what you get on the big screen

Copying files is easy also but standard programs like Windows Media Player wont play AVCHD.

Each shot is a file.

The precoder idea is a good one, don't know of a solution for it though