What's the best camcorder?

In the late 1990s, the camcorder reached the digital era with the introduction of miniDV. Its cassette media was even smaller than 8 mm media, allowing another size reduction of the tape transport assembly. The digital nature of miniDV also improved audio and video quality over the best of the analog consumer camcorders (SVHS-C, Hi8.) Variations on the digital-video camcorder included the Digital8 camcorder, and the DVD camcorder.