What CHEAP camcorder for FCP (UK)?

Hi all,
I work in a college and we have lots of cheap mini DV camcorders which we use with FCP. We find cheap is better cos on our limited budget we cannot afford to replace expensive kit, and also we have so many students doing media we could not afford expensive camcorders for all.
Obviously now mini DV is on the way out we are hoping to gradually go over to flash-memory based camcorders. I am aware that FCP does not handle AVCHD easily, and it seems most (all?) camcorders in the sub-£400 bracket are AVCHD based. Can anyone recommend any camocorders that are not, and that work well with FCP6? If not, what about FCP7?
Thanks,
Sean

seanofford wrote:
...transcoding does not take for ever, and file sizes are only about the same as movs?
Sean
Transcoding times are directly dependent on the type of the machine, the file size and the end medium. You're using a laptop so it's not gonna leave markings on the tarmac.
ProRes is a very fine format. It is much bigger than AVCHD but we're talking about a master quality professional codec with relatively small size compared to a codec never meant for editing. Try not to confuse the .mov extension, it is a wrapper and can contain from e.g 4k RGB 10 bit uncompressed up to plain ol' .H263-4, and the sort.
If you're going to use an AVCHD camcorder you're going to have to deal with the this process or switch to something like Adobe CS5 which has however yet to prove its robustness. CS4 proved to be very, very, very buggy and unreliable.

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