I am not an expert by any means but for a consumer grade camcorder the HG10 is outstanding. I have had mine for about three weeks now and here are my observations.
Video quality is absolutly beautiful, even in the LP mode.
Batery life is pretty good.
Plenty of record time on the 40GB HD.
It takes great still pics in picture mode.
It takes great pics while simultainiously taking video footage.
The size of the camera is pretty good for my large hands.
Transfering the files to my PC is very easy using the Canon Backup Utility.
The rest of the supplied software is useless. It wont run on my PC.
As for editing the AVCHD files I've found two programs that handle it very well. Sony Vegas Platinum 8.0 ($69.99 on Amazon) and Ulead Video Studio 11.5 Plus ($69.99 on Amazon). Depending on you PC configuration you may get some jerky playback while editing. But the finished video will be fine. If you set the preview quality in Vegas to "Preview Auto" it will do away with most if not all of it.
The Sony program is envolved and very powerful but will take some time to learn. The Ulead program is much more user friendly for the novice. You can download a trial version of each one www.sonycreativesoftware.com and www.ulead.com.
I've also found that having a nice big external drive, I use a 1TB My Book, will speed up processing or compression times when reading from one drive and writing the finished video to another drive.
Useful additions to you HG10:
Canon BP-2L24H extended run battery
Canon CB-2LW battery charger
Canon hot shoe video light
A good fluid head tripod
A large external hard drive to store the raw files.
UPDATE: 7/14/08
Still love the my HG10. My comment is on saftware. I recently have to upgrade my computer and purchase an HP quad core, 1TB HD, 4gb of ram running Vista Home Premium 64bit. Sony Vegas does not support 64bit Vista yet but Ulead 11.5 does and it is utilizes the quad core processor as well. Ulead is not as advanced as Sony but until Sony gets it together Ulead is it for me. I converted a 4.5 minute HD video to a hd 1280x720 wmv in about 8-9 minutes. On my old dual core machine that would have taken at least a good hour.
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So far, I haven't had any major problems with this camera. I am new with HD camcorders. The video quality for this camcorder is quite excellent. Transferring video over to my computer works fast and well. I have not tried making DVDs using the program provided. I am disappointed I could not use other video editing software. The other drawback is the location of the power bottom; it is hard to turn on and off the camcorder with the fingers of the hand holding the camera. The use of the directional switch without moving the scroll wheel needs some getting used to.
In general I like the camcorder specially the video quality. So far I love it.
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