Camcorder buying advice for someone completely out of his element

flapjack

So, in the near future I'm going to need a camcorder it turns out. It will be used predominantly for indoor (but also potentially some outdoor stuff; zoom is probably not much of an issue so I'm not very concerned about that). However, I haven't really payed much attention to technology developments in this arena and the most recent thread I found in search was a bit outdated, so any recommendations would be appreciated.

I'm looking at roughly a $300-400 budget, so something pretty basic on the consumer level. I'm willing to budge a bit but hopefully not much. The best models I've found in that range so far seem to be the Panasonic V500M and the Sony CX260V. The Sony sounds like it has better low light performance, but I also looked up some sample videos on youtube and it seems to have a kind of irritating humming noise that accompanies any kind of recording where there isn't much ambient noise occurring. I could see that getting kind of annoying, so for that reason (and the fact that it's cheaper) I'm leaning towards the Panasonic right now. Any input, however, is vastly appreciated!

wonderpug

If you're mostly shooting indoors, you may want to think about the wide end of your zoom ability more than the telephoto end. I have a predecessor to that Sony cam you linked, and I'm pretty happy with it, but I bought the wide angle converter for it because shooting in something like a living room was just too difficult for getting everything I wanted in frame.