Err... well they record onto Mini DV tapes, so it's going to be a lot better than your camera phone. One minute of uncompressed footage on Mini DV is about 210MB, that should give you an idea of quality. It's a proper camera, not a shitty digital camera phone piece of shit. Oh, and it's a video camera, so it's video only. Some have a stills camera mode but it's not as good as buying a normal digital camera. Heres how it breaks down. If you buy a video/photo all in one camera, both the video, and the photo quality will be shit. If you buy a video camera, the video quality will be good, but the photo quality will be shit. If you buy a digital camera, the photo quality will be good, but the video quality will be shit. There's no way around that. If you want to make videos, buy a video camera. If you want to take photos, buy a digital camera, if you want to do both, buy both, but don't try and do both with the same piece of equipment, it wont work.