I bought an HD700 to record my newborn son and really wanted something that was small and easy to tote around. One of the main selling points was the fact that I didn't have to mess with tapes. Just shoot the video and import onto my Macbook Pro; it doesn't get much easier.

After unpacking everything, you'll see that it comes with a charging dock that also doubles as a media dock to connect to your TV using the supplied component cables or standard RCA cables. There is also a carrying case and a remote control.

As you probably know, this is a hybrid camera that shoots both video and pictures. The 7.1MP pictures are often grainy in low light, but they look decent in well lit conditions. Switching between shooting video and pictures is easy, just push the Photo button on the back if you want to take a picture, or push the Video button if you want to shoot video. The Xacti turns on/off very quickly by simply opening or closing the screen. I would estimate that it takes 1.5 seconds from opening the screen to the point where you can shoot video or pictures.

In good lighting, the 1280x720 HD video looks quite nice, not as nice as a full size HD camcorder, but definitely better than your average SD mini-dv camera in good light.

There are other shooting modes such as 320x240, 640x480 and 1280x720 with a "High Quality" and "Super High Quality" setting for each mode excluding the 320x240 mode. The 1280x720 full quality mode uses roughly 65 megabytes per minute and all modes record to an H.264 encoded MPEG4 file.

So far, the camera has been great, but it does have tradeoffs. For example, the low light recording is pretty bad, so you'll have to flip some lights on or else the resulting video will be quite noisy. I've noticed that the video comes out much better if you adjust the manual settings (iso, aperture, etc..) in the same way you would a normal digital camera rather than letting the camera do it. It also seems like it's constantly searching for the correct focus. While it's not always apparent on the small screen of the Xacti, it's very noticeable once the video is imported and is viewable on a larger screen. The best solution I can find is to set the focus manually at "Infinity". Anything farther than 2-3 feet away looks crystal clear using this method.

Another negative that I've discovered is that the electronic image stabilization could use some work. It basically crops the image and uses the cropped part to compensate for camera shake. It helps, but it feels like I'm always zoomed in a small amount and it's no match for a real image stabilizer. Since the camera is so small, it can be difficult to hold it still.

Like I said, there are trade-offs, but I'm willing to put up with them to have a small camera that fits in my coat pocket (probably a little large for pants pocket unless you're wearing really baggy pants).

If you're primarily shooting in well lit conditions, don't want to deal with dv tapes, and want a small camera, it's a pretty good option. Otherwise, you might want to look elsewhere.