I would be grateful for your advice re. a camcorder purchase for my work.

I work as a press officer in the European Parliament. We are increasingly met with the request from our politicians to make small video clips of them for Facebook, YouTube etc. For that, I am organising the purchase of 5-6 camcorders.
Many of my colleagues (including myself) are journalists, but definitely not very tech savvy, so the camcorders have to be easy to use.

I think they need to be harddisk/ssd based. I can’t imagine people here using tape and transferring the footage to a computer using FireWire. (I will of course be using my Canon HV40, though )

They need to be as compact and lightweight as possible. I’d rather ask those who want a steady shot to use a tripod than give them heavy and bulky camcorders which they won’t be using, because they also have other stuff to bring to meetings and events. In this context, for example, a Canon HVx0 would count as a heavy and bulky camcorder. The same goes for DSLR (probably too expensive, anyway).

They absolutely need to have an external microphone connector. The meeting rooms here are generally noisy due to air condition, bad acoustics and people talking around you. Sound from a built-in mic is mostly useless.

Price is an issue: I don’t think we would like to spend more than 5-600 EUR per camcorder, knowing that we’ll probably also need to buy microphones for them…

Thank you all!