Easy to use, great quality for the price.

I bought the Canon ZR500 because I wanted to capture family memories. This camera is very simple to operate if you are a beginner as I was. You can just point and shoot and the automatic adjustments turn out a very nice quality picture with no effort on your part. It also offers some more advanced functions such as manually adjusting focus and exposure, setting white balance and shutter speed, or using image effects. The zoom is amazing; even at maximum distance it is a very clear picture, and the zooming in and out causes less fuzziness than other camcorders I have seen. The camera is stylish and fits nicely in the hand; the strap feels secure and I find it easy to move the camera one-handed and press the controls smoothly. The playback is fairly simple to operate. This model is also supposed to be able to transfer the picture to a computer; however, the instruction booklet is not detailed on how to do that, so that is not as easy for a beginner to figure out. If you want to film a lot outside, the quality of this camera for the price is wonderful. Inside shots are not quite as good, though still better than many others I've seen. I have used it quite a bit to film my son skiing, and I've been very pleased with the picture quality and zoom capability. I would definitely recommend this as a good quality camera for a beginner to intermediate who is on a budget.