Anyone have recommendations? Budget is about $1000.

I've been a fan of Canon, and I've heard JVC's are pretty nice.

I've got an old JVC GR-DVX 8. I got it 2-3 years back so it's quite old now.
I've found it to be okay and did what I needed it to do. I made sure I got the version which had DV-IN enabled as I wanted to mess around with it via IEEE1394. The build quality of mine was okay, nothing amazing however. One of the small screws on the bottom fell off after a while but I just put it back in and put a dab of thread locker on it.
THe only problem I've found is that the batteries are kind of flakey and don't last very long.

Not sure how useful this is to you considering it's such an old MiniDV camera.

Thanks for the info. This is actually going to be the "family camcorder" -- general purpose, use it every 4 months. Editing and hooking it up to the computer aren't really concerns of mine. I just want something with a good pic quality, preferably small and decent battery life.

Ah okay. Picture quality it's fine. It's full resolution PAL on mine and there aren't that many compressoin artifacts when it is set to max quality. The EP mode doubles the length of the tape but makes the compression evident. It doesn't like very fast movement but apart from that it's fine. It's definately better than the older Hi-8 and equiv analogue cameras however.
The one I've got is the rectangular shaped ones. It's smaller than the rounded ones but not as comfortable to hold.
The viewfinder and LCD are pretty good quality and are both up to the task. The batteries are thin Li-Ion ones and last about an hour each. The ones I've got went bad because I left them discharged for a few months. If you look after them then I don't see any problems with it.

I have a Canon Elura 40MC, and it's pretty nice. It's light on battery life (30m) but the batteries are so small and cheap that you could carry 6 of them and not notice the difference. You can buy bigger aftermarket batteries that stick out just a bit more but have longer life.

The picture quality is excellent outside, and inside it's fairly good, but not super. I found it's hard to get a single CCD DV camcorder that takes good inside picture quality. The big selling point for mine is that it is TINY. It's about the size of my still digital camera (a Canon Powershot G1) and it's lighter in weight. I can easily fit this in with my camping gear, beach bag, etc. and not feel like a tool with it in my hand either. I compared this to the Sony PC101 and the Canon Optura 100MC and the price was right on the Elura 40. I got mine on eBay new for $640, then got a $100 rebate from Canon.

The new Canon MV650i is supposed to be very good

BTW, still nobody knows for a left-handed model of a decent digital camcorder? (My question two years ago drew zero responses...)