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The Fish FVD-C1 certainly isn't your typical video camcorder was firebane pointed out.
Any camera that records video to an SD memory card instead of a tape is recording in MPEG4 format, which is *highly* compressed (smaller data size, less quality) And while all consumer digital video formats are compressed, MPEG4 really takes the cake. I find video recorded in MPEG4 to be fuzzy, pixelated and often times, simply unwatchable (as well as audio being tinny and garbled). If lasting, quality video of your kid is what you are looking for, I would highly reocmmend to look at miniDV or Digital 8 cameras and getting a firewire card for your computer to transfer the video (also, MPEG4 might not be very widely supported for editing, if at all).
Now, I know Fisher advertises their video as DVD-like, but its a pretty misleading claim. Commercial DVDs use MPEG2 compression at very high bitrates and at the televsion standard resolution of 720x480, whereas the Fisher camera would record at 640x480, an image which would have to stretch to fit a TV screen, decreasing the quality even further.
A good indication of video quality is how much storage space it eats up. We can estimate you're average commercial DVD is can hold about 3 hours of video, and it would take about 6 512MB SD cards for the same amount of time. So what takes up about 8 gigabytes on a DVD only takes up 3 gigabytes in SD cards. So the Fisher FVD-C1 doesn't even come close to matching the quality of DVD, without even factoring in the optics of the camera.
So, within the upper end of your budget, you can get a pretty decent miniDV camera (tapes hold an hour and cost about $5-7 each), as well as get a firewire card that would let you take the video to your pc where it can be easily edited with a program like Windows Movie Maker, and spit either back out onto tape or onto VCD/DVD (depending on your equipment).
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