hdd or memory card would serve you way better then any tape device right now. unless you got the time to spend hours capturing the video from tape to hard drive on your computer just so you can edit, resize, and make movies to publish out of it, then a hard disk drive or memory card type will be ideal for you. thats what i ended up doing.

you've got trade-offs tho. many say that the quality tape units have way better ccd's and more accurate color. the memory card/hdd models are way over saturated in color.

i've gone through quite a few tape mini-dv's and don't like the size nor the hours i need to capture the video to do anything with it. i've switched over the the sanyo vpc hd-1 hybrid now. its about the size of a cell phone and fits in my pocket. it records on a 4gb sd memory card. digital still pictures are captured at 5.5 megapixels and video is in HD at 16:9. at the highest quality mode, i get 56 mins out of the 4gb card recorded in MP4 format.

best thing is, i just pull the card and its ready for use instantly.. that to me was worth trading in the better ccd's that the tape units had. not that i saw that as a trade off because the picture quality is still great to me. a few folks here have seen video footage of it that i took while at the race track one day and they thought it was super clear and had amazing picture and color (keep in mind that i had to shrink the video from HD format to something much smaller so i can make it downloadable 2 GB down to 40 mb)

my latest diy pics are taken from the same camera so you can see the quality of the pics there...

your purposes sound similiar to mine: handy use all around camera to capture those precious moments with the lil ones... for that, the super small size and digital ready format was key.

good luck!