Ahh, now, Jim, I can help you.
Cameras are my trade (I'm a photographer and sometime videographer).
If video quality is important to you, you'll want to go with optical zoom. Digital zoom is pretty much somewhere between useless and terrible. All you get is bigger pixels. A waterproof option is obviously good for any pastime involving water, but I would suggest that unless you are clumsy, out in the thrashing rain, or into underwater photography, a waterproof camera/camcorder is not necessary. I often take a camera or camcorder fishing, and have never dropped it in the water. If you're particularly worried about it, get a neck strap and put it round your wrist or neck whenever the camera is out of your bag.
You can buy waterproof housings for cameras/camcorders, should you be wanting to use it while, say, wading.
As for formats (I know you haven't asked, but while we're on the subject...), the modern camcorders are great - small, light, easily put in a pocket, but unless you have a mighty computer avoid the Hi-def camcorders. Most use a format which requires major processing and most people's computers simply grind to a halt.
There are some memory card camcorders that are good. They give you good enough quality video but without the need for an Uber PC.
Then there is good old mini DV, which I actually really like. The quality is good enough for home use, and your footage is always backed up (HDD camcorders and to an extent SD card camcorders require you to back the footage up to your PC if you want to keep it, then to a portable HDD or worse, DVDs if you want to make sure it's safe). The only trouble with mini DV is that the camcorders are getting quite difficult to get hold of (on the highstreet, at least).
DVD camcorders, last time I looked, were never that successful. The image quality was poor, and I seem to remember there were questions about the reliability of the disks.
I recently got a Canon HDD camcorder for about £400. The quality is great, though, as I mentioned, you need a powerful PC to do anything. One of the best things is the low light performance. I also have a little JVC sd card camcorder, which, while not so good in poor light, is wonderfully small. I fit in a coat pocket and it starts practically instantaniously - that is one of the beauties of SD card camcorders, there's no time lag from initialising the disk as with HDD camcorders, or with the tape loading as with mini DV.
In my book, the best brands are Canon, Panasonic and Sony. I'd watch out for anything from a company which has no long term experience of cameras - Samsung, Hewlet Packard etc.
Hope that's a help.
let me know if there's anything else you want to know.
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