For the price I paid, this camera is a great value. It's not true Hi-Def, but the quality is amazing. Better than my GL2, and fits in the same case I used to carry my digital snapshot camera in. There are better cameras out there, but how many of them can you fit in your pocket? My GL2 is in the back of my closet. My HD-1A is in my glove box, on stand-bye, ready to shoot in three seconds. Which do you think will get more use? Battery life is right around 40 minutes, so get extras. One 4gb SDHC card will hold several hours of video and an infinite amount of high resolution stills. So maybe two memory cards and and 3-4 batteries, and you're ready for anything. Sound quality is better than expected, but not great. Luckily, there's a jack for an external microphone. This is a referb, and the box showed it, but all of the accessories were included, and factory fresh. This camera is the best electronics purchase I've made in years.

As much as I wanted a higher end HD Camcorder I needed something that could fit in my ski jacket, when hiking, etc... since this is when I want to take 90% of my videos. This fits the bill but have yet to see action video.I use a Mac and iPhoto and iMovie so no need for the windows based software that is provided... I simple take the memory card from the camera and then use a card reader hooked up to a USB port... Everything down loads and can be edited.Plugged in to our HD TV looks fantastic and with the remote it is easy to watch video and view pics on the big screen.The only draw back so far is with Indoor / filming a performance was to dark but have yet to look at the features to see if I can improve that.