I just recently purchased the Canon HG20 HD camcorder.  It has a 60 Gb hard drive and records high-def 1080p video.  It also has a 12x optical zoom.  I'm very pleased with my purchase.  It is an excellent unit. 

I bought it to start recording videos for the Robot Geek projects.  However, it does produce mts or MPEG Transport Stream files.  I attempted to run those files through Adobe Premiere & Media Encoder and MS Expression Media Encoder.  None of those apps would recognize that format.  Then I found AVS Media.  They have a product called AVS Video Converter.  It immediately recognized the format and allowed me to convert to whatever format I wanted.  Sweet!!  And then I realized that they have a video editing app.  I tried it out and it is a full featured editing app.  It has over 200 transitions, video effects and text overlay.  It's simple to set in and out points.  I was able to be productive immediately with this.  And the price was fantastic.  It is currently $59 for the video converstion and video editing apps, plus a host of other apps that are included.  I highly recommend checking it out.