Anyone know about camcorders?

My daughter has a couple of big dive meets coming up so I was under the gun and had to order something fast so I bought the panasonic SDR-h40.

I didn't want to spend a ton of money, I got this online from costco for around 280 plus I had to get a tripod. Her coach needed this to write to a SD card or someway for him to get it on his pc to send to colleges.

Does anyone know about these new camcorders? I am pretty lost reading manuals and would like to have someone to ask questions.

This has I guess an internal 40 gig harddrive you can write to or your SD card, are the ones with mini dvd's better or just different?

I have a Sony Handycam that writes to the mini DVDs. The picture and sound quality is great.. but it is a pain in the behind to upload any video to your computer because it saves it in .vob format like a regular movie DVD. I discovered a program once upon a time that allowed me to copy the files to my computer so that I could combine them onto one standard size DVD but it was arduous and time consuming. Perhaps they come with this software now, but mine did NOT and it drives me crazy.
Speaking of which, if anyone knows a way to do these things that doesn't cost a fortune please let me know:D

It did come with software...something suite I can't remember the name...hopefully its not to hard to figure out...

The ones with SD cards like you bought are supposed to be a lot easier to work with!! I don't think you should have any problems with it.

I was just sharing my horror story because you asked if the miniDVD ones were better:)

Oh I know thanks...I just get impatient with this kind of stuff.

I have a really nice camera that would have probably worked for this but I got tired of trying to figure stuff out. I am not even sure where it is right now:o