The search for our new camcorder

This is an interesting learning and decision-making experience. I've just spent a few hours on the Internet and an electronics store near my house trying to figure out what we're going to buy.

We had a Victor video camera that we bought a few months before my son was born, roughly seven years ago, but it jammed and died last month just as I fired it up to record his sports day.

So...we are on the market for a new one, but there are too many damn models and specifications! I haven't cornered a sales guy yet, but I think I'll have to do that next to get some answers.

The goal is to get something reasonably priced but

1. is fairly small and easy to carry around (SD card memory makes thing lighter it seems)
2. has good zoom for kids sports events (20x?) and decent image stabilization,
3. has a good battery life (2 hours would be nice),
4. takes "good enough" video to play on a larger TV screen, say 32 or 37 inch, when we burn DVDs for relatives (so...how many pixels do we need? and do we need High Definition?)
   
5. takes good enough still photos with resolution to print nice post cards (300 Mega pixels?)
6. is easy to output video to a computer or hard drive for editing or burning or storage (so no DV tapes any more, but is it better to have a HDD capacity as well as SD cards?)

CNET recommends the Canon Vixia HF20/21 as the best current buy (See review). I kind of liked the look and feel when I was at the store today, so hmm...this may work.
On Japan's online user review/ sale comparison site Kakaku.com, it is about 56,000yen.

The most popular item on Kakaku.com seems to be the JVC Everio HM400, priced around 66,700yen. I played with this at the store today and it seemed very nice. Amazing picture quality and good battery life and recording memory capacity 32GB plus slots for additional SD cards if needed. SD card memory prices will keep falling too.

But what's the best buy? While both of those above were nice, some of the lesser spec models also seemed enough for our purposes. I mean, why not go with the HM200 which is almost half the price at 37,000? Will it make a big difference?

Kakaku does a cool comparison chart like this, which shows the HM200 to be weaker in battery life as well as image resolution. In the store today, I felt is somewhat, but the HM200 seemed OK. I like that the HM200 is lighter due to having to HDD memory. It comes with two 8GB SDHC cards instead (which retail for about 2500~4000yen each), which only records about 80 minutes. We'll probaby need to buy SDHC cards for more memory.