Camera choice for web only distribution

I've been reading forums and researching for the last 5 months or so, and I've come to the point where I need to ask some questions. This seems like the right place, so here it goes.

First, a long time friend and myself started a website about a year ago. It's an outdoors site and is based on product reviews and the outdoor lifestyle. The site has been gaining traction and we're starting to attract sponsors and generating a little bit of advertising revenue. Part of our plan for the site was to start producing our own videos, but not just hokey product promotion/review videos. We want to make the videos have more feeling, be less scripted and more appealing to watch. More like documentary shorts and art pieces than commercials.

I'm an illustrator by trade, and spend my 8hrs/day doing 3d animations and working in AE and PP, so I've got the editing down for the most part. I also do promotional videos for my office and have been working with a canon HF200 and editing in HD 1080 @ 60i, 24p etc. and getting a feel for HD video editing workflow.

For my side work/website, we're at the point where we want to buy a camera and shortly after, a second. Here's where I need some advice. The videos aren't going to be heavy on the sound dept. and aside from a few discussions in the outdoors, there really isn't going to be much dialog in most of the shorts we plan to produce, so keep that in mind. What I'm just not sure about is the capabilities of the camera(s) I need to buy for my web shorts. I have a few things in mind that I want to achieve:
1. The ability to get shallow DOF (though I'm not a huge fan of this recently because it's getting overdone)
2. The ability to shoot at higher frame rates to get slow motion shots in the final.
3. Decent manual features for controlling the look/feel of the shots.
4. Cheap! - I'm a father supporting a family of 3 and usually only get about $100 of money a month to spend on my "stuff", so I have to save up to make purchases. My buddy doesn't make a lot of scratch, and he's buying the second camera.

Here's where I'm at. I'm thinking about the Sanyo vpc-fh1 as camera A, and really simply because of the ability to shoot 1080 @ 60p. Could I get a better camera and only do the slow motion stuff in 720p? And the Sanyo VPC-WH1 as camera B for the simple fact that 100% of the footage is going to be shot in and around water. Since the WH1 shoots in 720, should I just focus on cameras that do 720 well? Since it's for the web, am I going to be sorry I didn't go with full 1920x1080?

For budget reasons, and to try to achieve 1,2 and 3 from above, I'm looking at slapping a jag35 on the fh1 to get some better lens effects. Again, I'm not crazy about using shallow DOF all the time, but I do want to be able to get some of it if it supports the shot.

Finally, I've already been spending an arm and a leg on the production of the website, and as such my budget is very small. Hence the selection of $400 cameras.

If you've stuck with this rambling this far, any advice you guys can give would be appreciated for gear. I'm not aiming for true film festival quality here. Just better than the norm for the web.
 
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