A professional high-definition video camera for $1,700? Yes, that's right. Here's one of those cameras you put on your shoulder (vastly increasing stability) and manually operate focus, zoom, exposure and the like on a lens ring. Or you can pop it on a quality tripod and have a manual operator keep up with your mobile pastor when he's delivering a sermon without having to zoom out. For less than what a Canon GL2 costs, you get HD and all the bells and whistles. Almost.

A lot of the controls are accessed on a menu in the viewfinder instead of on the body of the camera, which makes it harder to do quick adjustments. Fortunately, there's an auto mode for most of the stuff and it works pretty well. The stabilizer doesn't make tripod-shot footage look weird, the lighting balance works well, and for the most part the auto focus will suffice. The lens ring lets you manually adjust one of focus, zoom, exposure, shutter speed, white balance at a time. There are plenty of outputs on this, including composite, component, HDMI and DV. I found the composite a little flaky sometimes, but the rest seem great.

This is an entry-level professional camera. Really low lighting might cause some problems, and the lack of a XLR mic inputs can be a pain, although there's a phono jack that will work well with dynamic and battery-operated shotgun mics. It shoot really nice video in almost all situations, and for the price it's hard, if not impossible, to beat.

There's quite an allure to having fixed, robotic controlled cameras, especially when it's hard to find volunteers to operate manual cameras. You often get better video from manual cameras, since you can have an operator zoom in and maintain frame, which is darned hard to do with a robotic. Before getting something like your first BRC-300, you might want to first pick up this baby which will give you more flexibility, and cost less.

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