VIDEO UPDATE: So yesterday I shot a good deal of video with the new HD camera, and then put it up on the big HDTV to see how it looked. It turned out very well. The video was good, and seemed to actually make people’s skintones look better — something not all HD cameras do, to put it mildly. It was much enhanced by this tiny and cheap video light (34 bucks is cheap, isn’t it?). It fits in the accessory shoe and adds a bit of fill light. I shot with and without it and it made a considerable difference. The 5.1 surround sound was good, though honestly I’d rather have a shotgun option since when you’re shooting video at a Thanksgiving get-together where everyone’s talking at once, surround-sound doesn’t really do much. Still, the performance was very good, the camera was easy to use — the Insta-wife took it and did some shooting with no more familiarization than me pointing out where the on-off and zoom buttons were — and the video was quite good.

I recommend — pretty much no matter what camera you have — that you get one of those little fill lights. We have one for the Canon, too, and it also makes a surprising difference in video quality, and in how people look.