The Sony CX series are good cameras at around $299. I have a CX-110 for home movies and it's a great little camera (now discontinued but you can still find them for around $269). At $200 you'll only get something like my Kodak Zi8 which takes nice shots, edits smoothly in Vegas, but really needs a lot of light to get a useful image. This is not something I would take on a shoot.
Whatever you get, make sure that you can edit the footage in Vegas because at that price range, the manufacturers do not follow any standards and put out a lot of junk formats and wacky frame rates that can't be edited.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
