As camcorders come down in price, they're becoming an option for people who up until now had been satisfied with normal cameras. While camcorders will never replace photography, however, there are plenty of good reasons to have one, especially if you can get it at a good value price.

The number one use of camcorders is to allow you to record home videos. I'm not talking about the kind of home videos where you fall over and send it to TV channels to try to make a little cash (feel free to do that as well, though) - what I'm talking about are memories. There are few better ways to remember what your children were like when they were small, your holidays, your pets, and life events like weddings. Even better, years later, you can show them to people who weren't born or weren't old enough to remember.

When it comes to things like weddings, many people hire a professional to film it. Buying a camcorder, however, can actually be much cheaper. While the results used to be amateurish, the rise of digital camcorders means that the picture quality is now often very good. These kinds of videos tend to be much more personal than something professionally-produced, too, and avoid you having to have people at your wedding who aren't friends or family.

Of course, you can do more with a camcorder than just make home movies. Video on the web is currently undergoing a massive boom on sites like YouTube and Google Video, and a camcorder is the ideal tool for keeping your own video blog. Camcorders have much higher picture quality than webcams, and allow you to record sound far more easily - all the best video blogs are produced on camcorders.