I needed to get a camcorder for a film class at the college I attended. It was an introductory tutorial so I didn't have to do anything special with it, but it seems to be a very good video camera. It has a lot of great features, good video recording quality and fits on the tripod I already had. The battery lasted quite a while before needing to be recharged and the zoom was good enough for me. The camera is also not heavy, making it easy to carry around. But most importantly, I had no problems converting AVCHD files to .mov and other formats with Adobe Media Encoder, which I was worried about. It doesn't do a good job of recording in the dark/night, but according to my teacher, this is a common problem with a camcorder. All in all, this is a great camcorder!