We will be making special home movies

and home videos of trips so we need a good all purpose HD cam.
What is light, affordable, plays nice with Macs and making DVDs and has no tape? Preferably just hard disk based. Oh and what format do you recommend? HDV? AVCHD blah blah blah.
Thanks
p.s. why did this get moved to Blu-Ray Camcorders? HD doesn't necessarily mean BR. Can just be HD video edited on my Mac. And the camcorders certainly don't say Blu-Ray on them. Do they?