It must be over two years ago now when I bought a new JVC everio GZ-MG50 AG digicam with 30 GB HDD. My wife and I run a small digital photo studio in the North of Thailand, and she became more interested in the video side, especially with two young kids too. We started to get the occasional task to video weddings/funerals/house warmings and usually took still shots too to add as a slide show at the end of the video. The Cyberlink Power Director and Power Producer software which came on the CD with the camera is very easy to use and produced the results we desired without too much technical knowledge needed.
Later we upgraded to their Cyberlink DVD Suite, but finding that it didn't include thye latest version of Power Director 5 upgraded to that too, as we were interested in the PIP mode.
Last month whilst filming a wedding the JVC stopped comunicating with its HDD, so that will need to go for repair. More wedding work is on the books, so we decided to get another camera to use. Originally looking at the JVC GZ-HD7 which we saw in their store here, and thinking that the move to HD would be good, but the price was more than US$2,000 here, and after discovering that it could be bought in the US for $999 from Amazon changed our minds. A guy here has one too which he bought in Japan for about $900, but there is not much of a customer base for videocams here in Thailand so prices are not competitive.
Suddenly faced with a wedding the next day and no camera I went shopping in ChiangMai. I would have got a newer version of the JVC Everio HDD camera that we had before, since the price was half what we paid originally and the specs were a bit better too, but JVC lost the sale, because they stupidly changed the size of the batteries, so we were unable to use the ones we had bought for our old JVC.
I was considering a Sony model with mini DVD discs and memory stick, but their accessories like batteries and memory sticks are twice the price of the competition. Then I saw the Panasonic HDC-SD9 which had only arrived a few days before, and liking the idea of using large SD cards and having HD too, we got that. It came with 4GB and 8 GB cards and a free Panasonic VW-BN1 DVD burner. But since it was so new there were no new batteries to be had anywhere in the city. Panasonic stupidly changed their batteries too. There were plenty of older model batteries around, including those by other makes, which , although they looked to be the same size as the one which came with the camera have VERY slight differences. Just slight notches in the corners etc. which prohibit the use of older ones. Very exasperating and annoying. I felt like buying one and putting my swiss knife to it just to have a spare to use. Why are companies so greedy that they have to change the size of batteries for each new model, not for any good reason, just to force customers to part with more money. Epson does the same with its ink cartridges for each new printer model.
The next day without having had any time to experiment much we went and shot the wedding. Most people here still use VCD players and only a few have upgraded to DVD players, so I chose the 'HX' setting for quality to get enough time on our 8Gb SD card (2 hrs), and thinking it would be at least as good quality as we had been used to before. Actually the battery which came with the camera was good for about 80 mins of use and with a brief recharge during a quiet period didn't give us any problems.
That evening back in the studio the headaches started. Using the HD Writer 2.5E software which came on the CD to convert the files to mpeg2 was no problem. But my old Cyberlink Power Director software was not up to the task of editing and saving anything useful. The HD/mpeg2 files being in widescreen format, whenever I tried to get them into a useable format and burn to DVD disc they came out squashed up. I tried our old Sony Vegas 6 program and that was no better. The 15 day (Wow!) trial of Pinnacle studio which also came on a CD was just plain stupid....it refused to install because it said I didn't have WinXP SP2 installed (I have SP3 beta... ;-( ). So I had filmed a wedding, and the results looked good on the computer screen, but I couldn't work out how to get them onto a DVD so that the customer could watch them at home.
I went back to the Cyberlink website and found they had a new version of Power Director 6, which they said could cope with HD/16:9/Blu-ray etc. so I upgraded to that. Finally managed to get it onto DVD in 4:3 mode as a letterbox format....and the slide show was good too.

Why cannot the HD capable camera also have lesser quality settings available, such as 4:3 and Mpeg, switcheable on the camera...or are these cameras only aimed at those with HD/widescreen T.V.'s?

I regularly shoot events with my Panasonic AG-HSC1U (the so-called Pro version of the SD-1) at the highest HD quality and then use Pinnacle Studio 11 and or Nero Vision to produce standard DVDs which will be shown letterboxed on a traditional TV set. The most recent Nero will take the raw footage from these HD camcorders and produce a traditional DVD (maybe a VCD too). For my own use with wide-screen LCD HDTV sets, I can watch in 16:9 full screen.

I carry two spare batteries and spare SDHC cards into the field. I often will take a spare SD camcorder too.

Your journey of HD discovery was interesting to read. You managed to deal with all the issues and produce the desired product. While using one of these 21st Century HD camcorders gives you more flexibility in how you produce the final product, it introduces new obstacles to overcome to produce the products of the 20th Century your clients want.

It's possible that given your clientele, maybe a good SD camcorder with SDHC cards and or hard-drive would have been a better choice. Here in the USA, I think an HD camcorder would be best for what you are doing.

Bye.

Sony and JVC HD cams have SD mode. Canon does not. AFAIK, Panasonic does not too.

Canon FS100 might be a good choice for you, but it is just being released, and you already got the Panasonic.