Me and my friends, interested in making the ubiquitous documentary of our lives, are interested in purchasing a video camera. Digital being too expensive, we are looking for one of the old tape ones. I know these were available new in the last five years, but do any major stores sell these or am i gonna have to get a used one?
Tape doesn’t mean analog. Sony has digital 8 tape and everyone else has mini-DV tape. Go to an electronics store and see how inexpensive they are. If you have a sufficiently fast PC with enough storage a firewire board and the right software will allow non-linear editing.
Are you a student? Or do you have access to a university multimedia lab? You can probably edit in there for free and store your project on a server somewhere, though you may have to sweet-talk the lab attendant a bit. (If possible, use a Mac; in my experience, editing video on a Mac is far superior to editing it on a PC.)
And here is a Froogle listing of DV caamcorders for under $200.
Good luck!