A while back, not knowing that regular digital cameras don't take good sound quality, I bought a digital camera and was disappointed with the sound. I was
recording music with hand bells, hand drums, keyboard instruments, and singing - a lot of instruments at once and quite a lot of noise. The problem was that the hand drums were recorded way off beat even though in reality they were played on time, and the sound quality generally was very poor for recording this kind of music. I was wondering what videocameras out there would not give me this problem. I read somewhere that even with handheld videocameras, the sound quality "sucks" - I guess this implies that the only good option is professional videocameras? Is this true?

Basically, the minimum sound quality I can settle for is something that records even sounded, non-choppy, music when there are a lot of instruments in the room. What would be ideal, however, is something that would record high sound quality with minimal background fuzz, something that would be ideal for taking just the sound part of the video and converting it to an mp3 to listen to on an mp3 player. What are the lower end videocameras that would deliver this kind of performance that I'm looking for?
I was looking at the Canon GL2, and there are some used on amazon for less than $1500, but that's kind of pricey for me even though I might bite the bullet and pay that price for something decent. The problem, I've heard, with the GL2's is that many of them get this tape eject error which costs about $400 to fix- they can work fine for years and then all of a sudden have this problem. I also was looking at the PanasonicPro AG-DVC20 3CCD, which is at the lower end of the professional cameras, but it's a little large, something like 23 inches long. I'm going to be traveling and if I had this camera I would have to give up on taking important things along with me on my carry-on- basically I would only be able to carry this camera and my laptop and almost nothing else. My mom had something stolen by a Mexican airport and so I don't pack expensive things into my suitcase. Anyways, these two cameras are still a little on the high end and I would prefer something in the $500 - $1000 range, but I don't know if any cameras that price would have good enough sound quality. Are there any lower end hand-helds that can have external mikes hooked up to them?

Also, image resolution isn't a high priority for me. For my needs, I'm not concerned about having higher resolution, but longer recordings. Something that can take nice images in low lighting would be considered an advantage, too.

Any advice?

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