I'll give you both "helpful answers" rewards. Sorry for not replying, but for some reason I'm not getting notified of replies the way I used to, so it seemed that no one had responded to this.
Anyway, I ended up buying the camera. I'm still working on the "project that was due in a few days" (heh-heh) but that's how it goes. But so far, I'm loving this camera. Why?
I make web videos and marketing videos for my own company, which relates to musical instruments, specifically electronic keyboards. So I need to shoot talking heads (usually myself), and then hands playing keyboards, pressing buttons on them, interacting with them (usually my own), etc. All in a studio environment (mine). And I have semi-pro video lighting gear - so low-light shooting isn't a concern.
I had an SD camcorder previously, and I hadn't produced a substantial video in a couple of years. Everything's HD now. I decided I had to get with it. But after doing some research, I was worried about all the formats, the capturing and logging, etc.
The single most wonderful feature of this camera (for me) is that it truly is painless and drag n' drop (so to speak). I shoot the footage - I plug in the USB cable, the camera goes into USB mode, the media shows up on the mac as a hard drive, you go in and there are the clips, in .MOV format. Open them immediately in QT and watch, and decide which ones you want to keep. Take those, drag them to your project folder, then drag them into FCP. Done. Drag into a sequence. Done. No problems, no issues at the moment. I'm shooting 1080x720p30 for this project.
Video quality is excellent, I don't have a lot of experience with HD cameras so take it FWIW, but it's crystal clear and looks great. The included external microphone (+48v phantom) and audio unit performed well enough in the studio (I did set it to manual level control) in the few talking heads clips I needed for this project so that I didn't need to hook up my own external mic and all the bother that goes with that.
The beautiful part of the way the camera works for my workflow (and other cameras may do this, I don't know), is that I do try to map out shots ahead of time, and then shoot them all. But while I'm editing, laying out the video, I may decide I need another shot. Everything's still set up, I just turn on the lights, unplug the USB cable, the camera goes back into camera mode, I shoot another shot of what I suddenly decided I needed, plug the USB cable back in, there's the hard drive, drag the MOV clip to my folder and FCP - done. I like this kind of work flow. Editing and shooting at the same time, if needed. Or sometimes you have an idea - maybe it would look better if I shot it from that angle, now that I'm looking at it in the final thing. The amount of time between getting that thought, and shooting a new idea and getting it into FCP onto the timeline, is pretty minimal.
So, I'm really liking the camera so far. It does what it says it would do.
