I am currently in training as a lighting cameraman so deal with a lot of cameras and this isn't too high up on my list as a camera of choice. I borrowed this camera to take to my local nature reserve in my stills camera backpack setup in order to get some shots of otters and the mass migration of Bewicks Swans. The size of the camcorder is great with it being small and light. The level of control however is not good. I put zebra on on the camera so the camera would flag up overexposure for me and almost the entire picture was covered by zebra lines all the time and i couldn't do anything about the exposure. I tried switching to manual and changing through there but the camera is just so unintuitive. I decided to record to SD card and it was nice to have that option. The menu system is pretty confusing and the labelling in the menus isn't much good either. Getting the camera home and putting the SD card in the system I found that the video files weren't recognized by any of the three editing suites I own and had to convert and deinterlace using Mpeg Streamclip to make the video even watchable which was the last thing i needed. Watching the converted footage back I was rather disappointed! If there is image stabilization in the camera, which I severely doubt after watching the clip, it doesn't work and if there isn't there should be. I was quite impressed with the inbuilt stereo microphone oddly as it captured the nosy chaos which is mass migration beautifully well.