All personal opinions here,,,
The camcorders that record to disc right now are just too new in their lifecycle. Too short of a recording time, too expensive media and too expensive in general. I still prefer the mini-dv tapes. You can dump them to your computer and either dupe them to dvd or cd, or edit first, then dup it.
Brands, I've had Canon, Sony and Nikon. I prefer the Canon. Whichever you get, make sure it has an optical image stabilizer instead of a digital. Works much better. I also prefer the lenses that Canon uses.
Pickups, I assume you are talking about getting a one ccd camera. Some of the high end models have three, one for each color. Much better, but much more expensive. If you are willing to pay big bucks, look into that also.
Zooms, Make sure the camera has a good optical zoom. If you use the digital zoom feature to get to the high end of the xoom range, quality suffers. If you try to zoom in too close, you will have to have it mounted on a tripod and also hope your subject stays pretty still.
Those are the biggies to me anyway.