My friend, who is a doctor, asked me to do a little research to find the BEST digital camera for him. Any suggestions? I was looking at the Canon XL1... but I don't have a clue what features to look for. He wants the best for the money.

Also, he wants a unit that will allow him to play mini DV tapes directly to his HDTV as well as dub them to VHS... any suggestions?

Thanks guys.

Well, any camcorder will display on a TV. I'm not sure about HDTV because I have no experience with them.

Does he want the smallest size possible? Then get the JVC (I forget the model). I was looking at it and it would be the camcorder I'd get, but I was just looking for size. There may be some features he wants that aren't on it.

The Sony units that sit on the Cnet top 5 are nice, too.

Now that I see which one the XL1 is, I'm guessing he doesn't want small! That's a monster, but looks nice. I can't speak to that range at all (I was just looking at compact styles). Sorry.

Does he expect to get HDTV native signals from his camcorder? That is, does he expect it to have 720 or 1080 lines of resolution? If so, I don't think that there are any consumer products available that will do that. However, it doesn't look like the XL1 is really consumer-oriented, either, but it would still help us to know.