Best camcorder?

Canon still makes the HV cameras with mini-DV tapes. HV40 is the most recent model, I believe.

Yup, most the other comparable cameras seem to be either harddrive or memory-card these days.

Dunno what to recommend... just wanted to mention that you can still get mini-dv tape ones

Sucks getting robbed, yah.

may the camera they stole blow up, sending shards of glass deep into their eyes!

Hard disk are on the way out... Flash or other solid state media is king. Has the same advantages as tape without the problems. As the price of memory cards keeps dropping, getting anything with "built" in memory makes less and less sense, or rather paying a premium for built in ram is unacceptable.. or at least should be

HDMI ready stand alone recorders, that bypass the cameras compression algorithms are on the way, which I think will extend the life of the current crop of HD cameras.

If you've been out of the new camera hunt for a while, you owe it to your self to look into DSLR, and next years coming crop of prosumer cams based on the DSLR imaging systems (changeable lenses etc)

that's my opinion, worth every penny you paid for it..

IMO hard drive cameras are terrible. Get tape or memory card. A hard drive is fine for the guy shooting his kids soccer game or graduation, not so good if you are doing a 14 hour day on set and have to stop and dump the footage from the drive. You want something you can swap out.