I bought this camcorder from B&H a couple of weeks ago. I just sent in a review but it hasn't been posted yet. In summary, I really like it as an entry-level, no frills camcorder. It is extremely small and light. I can carry it in my cargo pants pocket and not be weighted down. For the price, the video quality is very good. Forget about the photo quality. It is not much better than a cell phone camera, if at all. You do give up some features that give you a better user experience (no automatic lens cap, can't charge battery and using AC adapter at the same time, touch screen menu is not accurate, etc.) but those features do not contribute to better video quality, and therefore, are not deal breakers for me. The included software, however, is terrible. I am too lazy to read the manual and I can't figure out how to do anything in it. I only use it to transfer files to the PC and then switch to Pinnacle Studio for editing.
About the video file.... It is not AVI. It is AVCHD. The same compression as BluRay. The files are small but extremely demanding on the PC. On my dual core Athlon 4580e desktop, playback using WMP pegs the CPUs nearly 100% and sometimes the playback stutters. I solved the problem by using MPC HD + K-Lite codec pack for playback. It uses GPU hardware acceleration. However, editing with Studio still stutters badly as it uses its own non-accelerated codec. Fortunately, on my high-end T400 ThinkPad laptop I have no problem playing back with WMP and editing in Studio. The lesson here is that if you want to go HD video, you better have enough CPU power to deal with it.
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