I was shocked how well the Aiptek cams are when used as recording decks at standard def. I have the blue 720p model, the line-in recordings look almost as good as MiniDV. Getting footage into FCP is a breeze: just drag and drop.

I know it's a h.264 format cam, but it's not AVCHD. No transcoding required. What flavor is this? And more importantly, do any other, higher-end cameras use this flavor?

Are there other cameras with this type of format built-in? Sure, it's low bit-rate, but for my shooting it works fine. The Aiptek's actual camera mode sucks.