Check out the Canon S3 and S5. They are 12X compacts with great IQ and are claimed by users to have the best video/stereo sound and optical zoom features in the field.http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canons5is/page8.aspRegards,Hank..

Wow I checked out the S3 really nice , I'm going to check out the S5 next..

I just got a Canon S3. The video image is pretty good. LOTS of fun to play with that. But the sound quality is actually poor, in spite of being stereo. Yer telephone has better sound. If sound quality counts at all, stick with camcorders..

Kelly Cook..

Canon TX1. Pocket powerhouse..

Badboy12910 wrote:.

Hello all , I'm new to the forum and have a quick question .. I wantto buy hopefully the best Camera that also has a great video recorderin my price range which is 200-300 USDSo far the best thing ifound is the Casio Exilim EX-V8http://www.dcresource.com/reviews/casio/exilim_v8-review/index.shtml.

Best Wishes, Ajayhttp://picasaweb.google.com/ajay0612..

Thank you all for the helpGreatly appreciate it , I will get the S3 or the S5 .. Do you thing the S5 is a big change from the S3? I see a lot of the similar stuff but minor changes..

I got the S3 because the S5 was simply over my budget. Had I been able to spend as much as for an S5, I may have chosen some other brand than Canon. But so far no regrets on getting the S3. It is a huge improvement over the simple 4 year old point-and-shoot that I had been using. Here is a link to another thread that really digs into S3 vs S5 -.

Http://forums.dpreview.com/...ums/readflat.asp?forum=1010&thread=26169218.

Kelly..

Thanks kelly for the link , unless I have a little more to spend ill stick with the S3 since the movie capabilities are really the same from what I see minus the S3 only taking 1GB movies at a time .. Or am I wrong?..

I think that's right. So at the settings for highest quality a single S3 scene is limited to a little over 4 minutes. Shooting with the settings dumbed down to 320x240 and 15 frames/sec will stretch this limit a lot, but it is YouTube stuff. Does not compare to camcorder output at that point..

BTW, do NOT take the stills while shooting video feature seriously. Two reasons: 1) the still shot will be with flash off, no way to apply flash during a video. 2) Each still shot you take creates a blackout of almost 1 second within the video scene. Trying to edit a scene around these blackouts is a real pill..

Kelly..

Ok since I was right and they have the same video quality ill get the S3 ..Since I wont need to take long movies just 4-5 minute long movies .. I wont do the still shots , thanks again Kelly..

Err, the 4 min limit is per SCENE. Continuous shooting. You can shoot as many scenes as you want, and use an editor to splice them together into as long a movie as you want. So no limit on overall movie length. Unless you insist that your entire movie fit on a single memory card..

Kelly..