So the wheels are turning. I was at Best Buy today returning an item and browsed their camcorder section. I think I would like a camcorder with a built in hard drive- the only other options appear to be ones that record to DV tape or directly to DVD. The HDD camcorder one Best Buy had that was even close to my fictional budget was a JVC unit. I'm not a high end photographer (or videographer) so I don't need Gigapixel photos or 3 CCD captured video.

UPDATE - Doing some Google's pointed me to this very interesting AIPTEK cam. For $300, you get a camcorder that will do 16:9 720p recording to the .mov format- that price also includes a car charger, tripod, and some sort of bizarre docking station. Oh, and it records to 8GB SD cards. I know, I know- it's an off brand and you get what you pay for. But I'd rather spend the money on some decent video editing software and a big, fat external hard drive than dump it all into a camera I might not use very often.