High Definition cameras are Super ! I myself have been filming HD ( using a sony HC1 ) for almost a year now.

But beware ! there is lots of stuff they don't tell you ...

- dont fall for the Harddisk based ones. 4 hours and the drives are full. so if you go on a multiday / multiweek trip : bring a laptop with PLENTY of storage space ... so you can dump the files

- the direct to DVD macines : only blue rayplayers can handel the discs. you cannot play back in normal dvd player ( i am talking about the HD cameras that record to DVD . for SD there is no problem

and then editing , and this is where the frustration begins.

if you want to do anything with your HD video on the computer you need horsepower.

the bare minimum is the fastst dualcore with 2 gigs of ram. and that machine still crawls ... especially when you start doing color correction and fancy effects. ( even a simple 3 second crossfade kan take 1 minute rendertime ... )

if you want the editing to move think about quad cores or 2 physical processors ( Xeons or Opteron64's ), or go for a hardware solution like Matrox RTX2 then everything becomes realtime ( you still need a very powerful pc. again the bare minimum is a dualcore with 2 gigs ram )

I hope you purchased this article from Which? or something similar because yet again the mxing of comparisons between 1080i and 720p is bound to leave people unclear which is a 'higher' HD quality. It really annoys to see the industry claiming broadcast quality with an interlaced (i) resolution when broadcaster are most likely to take a pixel true level of quality. (p) so in this case what would we rather watch? the output from a squashed colour image on a 1080i camera, or the true detail of the pixel for pixel colour and b/w images of the uncompressed 720p? where are the 1080p perfoming 'behemoths'??