With the vacation season just around the corner, now would be a good time to buy all the gear you need, including the camcorder. But at the same time you definitely don’t want to go overboard and spend a bomb on a vacation camcorder and be low on the dough for the rest of your vacation now.

This entry level camcorder may not be too hot on features, but it can surely shoot a good home/vacation video. You may not find a lot of manual options in here, but considering the market segment its aimed at, a casual user probably wouldn’t have used those features to begin with.

If its manual option you’re looking for in an entry level camcorder, then the Handycam DCR-HC36 might just be the thing for you. It features a complete manual exposure mode, shooting presets like portrait and landscape as well as a NightShot plus mode that uses an infrared lamp to record in pitch black conditions. The touch-screen interface makes accessing all these options a lot easier.