There's some good info on the net, go to google & do a search on digital camera review. You'll find a bunch of good stuff. I've got a really nice Sony DCR VX2000. It's absolutely awesome, but slightly out of the range you specified. If you really really look you may be able to pick one up for 1800-1900. Best low light camera out there, short of the really high $$$ pro gear. Takes excellent pics at the night flies, fireworks, etc, with no to very little graininess. Color reproduction is damn near perfect and sharpness is excellent as well. Some TV networks actually use this as a production camera. It easily will handle the varying lighting conditions you speak of, and even has 2 nuetral density filters built in to it, and tells you when to use them. As far as focus goes, it does a very good job. It will on occasion when the subject is to far away drift out and back in, but when the plane is not so small as to be a speck it stays locked on. It also has a nice feature when in manual focus - an "autofocus" toggle / infinity button. Really glad I purchased it. Only problem? It's a little heavy (but not like the pro gear you may be interested in). Another good but less expensive is the Sony TRV900. Doesn't have all the features, nor as good low light capabilities, but argueably takes some of the best pro-sumer vid out there.

Want to shop around? THE format is Mini DV - forget everything else. Lossless editing, near (or even better than) broadcast quality and computer editing capabilities are the reason. Don't even think about buying a camera without image stabilization, any vid you shoot of planes requires it. BUT (contrary to the previous poster) stay away from the low end cameras with optical stabilization systems. The low end optical stab systems don't perform any better than digital stabilization and typically the mfr tacks on a fair amount for them. Big CCD's are a myth. The bigger the CCD the more light it takes to drive it, and your low light level video shots look terrible (like at dawn/dusk, in a room with 1 light or dimly lit). As far as stills go, don't buy a video camera because of its still image capabilities. The performance in video mode will suffer if it takes large stills! If you want stills, buy a cheap digital still camera, even the cheap ones take better pictures than most DV cameras. Another gimmick: high power digital zooms. They don't work worth a damn. Screws up the stabilization system and the pics are so pixelated & grainy on some cameras it's amazing the mfr would even sell them. You're far better off with a camera that has a decent optical zoom (10-20x), with little to no digital. My camera has 10X optical and 48x digital. At 48x it's pixelated to the point where a plane looks out of focus. 24X is the max you'll need for flying pics. Another gimmick - 0 lux ratings - yep it works (if the camera can focus), but you loose all color (actually goes green), the picture gets really grainy and the frame rate drops to nothing. I know a couple people that bought this hype, and after the gimmick wore off it became useless to them. As far as lux ratings, this is a subjective rating that each manufacturer come up with on their own, Each manufacturer has it's own opinion of what an acceptable picture looks like, and also uses different test methods for rating the cameras, so a 20 lux camera from one mfr may perform better than a 3 lux camera from another given the same conditions. Controls: in general, the more manual controls the better, but this is another thing mfrs charge for. A plane thing I can point to here is shutter speed; often auto mode makes blades/propellars freeze, and the video looks funny. Shutter priority corrects this problem. Guess that's about it off the top of my head. Good luck and happy shopping!