Buying a decent camcorder

[Enaver]

Hey, im looking to buy a camcorder with a budget of anything up to £400.
This is more me making independent films, i dont really know much about camcorders, so i need pretty much to be spoon feed. Mainly a good camcorder that would have good video quality and id be able to mess around with special effects.

If anyone could give me a list of a few camcorders up to £400 that would be great.

Thanks!

[Skyman]

most special effects are done in the computer these days, however if you are looking at using chroma keying (greenscreen) then a semi pro camera that records colour infromation more accurately will really help you, not to mention that you can manually control the focus and exposure so you have more control over the creative process. Unfortunately the flip side to this is that it will absolutely blow your budget, so I recommend either getting a very cheap digicam second hand or something and playing around with it whilst you explore your creativity and save all your pennies until you can afford a more suitable camera, or spend a lot of time working on your pre production processes, scripting, storyboarding etc so that you can shoot your shorts with a hired camera. This will actually give you a more rewarding result anyway as 80% of a film is achieved through solid pre production planning. The only downside is that you may not be able to get the best out of your hired camera (not being completely familiar with it) but then there is almost always someone who is willing to help out and lets face it most decent films, even short films need a crew.