How to Choose a Pro High Def Digital Camcorder

Features of a Professional High Definition Digital Camcorder

Manual Aperture: having the ability to manually control your lens's aperture size is important. This gives you control over the amount of light that passes through the lens and into the camcorder, and therefore gives you control over how light or dark your image will be.
Manual Focus: auto focus has a tendency to cause the camera to drop in an out of focus depending on what objects come in and out of the scene. With manual focus, you have full control to be able to stay focussed on your intended object.
3 CCDs: a CCD is a chip in the camcorder that records the image as digital information. 3 CCD chips means better quality images.
White Balance: different scenes have a different balance of colors. For instance, the light inside your house has a yellow tint, but light from the sun is more towards the blue end. With manual white balance control, you can set the color tone to your liking.
Audio Control: being able to manually control the sound recording volume is important, as some scenes will be louder or quiter than other scenes.
Headphone Jack: it is important to be able to monitor the sound via headphones, so check that the camcorder has a headphone jack.
Filter Ring: check to see whether the camcorder has a screw ring around the lens. A filter ring is extremely useful if you want to add various filters to your lens, such as a UV to protect from scratches or a polarising filter.
Sound Inputs: all camcorders have their own micrphones built-in, but what if you want to connect your own microphone so that you can record audio from a specific person or object?
Auto Functions: although manual controls are an important part of any good professional camcorder, sometimes you will want to just let the automatic settings make the decisions for you, so a mixture of both automatic and manual functions is essential.
Removable Lens or Lens Adapters: although only the top-of-the-range camcorders allow you to change lenses, some camcorders are able to use lens adaptors to change the existing lens to telephoto, wide angle, etc.

Top Pro High Definition Camcorder Makes & Their Range of Products

There aren't actually a huge number of professional camcorder brands out there, because professional camcorders are quite a specialist product.

Panasonic: $670-$6,000. A good range of fine quality high definition camcorders across a large price range.
Sony: $1,500-$5,200. As with Panasonic, a decent range spread across a big spectrum of prices.
Canon: $2,100-$10,000. A small number of very high-quality high definition digital camcorders.
JVC: $3,500-$5,400. A small number of very high quality professional camcorders