Another boring "choose a basic camera!" thread.

Hi guys- I've been discussing with my manager about purchasing a camera for our department. I work on a small corporate in-house creative team, and we've spent the past year diving into video production and multimedia as a marketing tool. We've been thinking lately about purchasing a basic piece of video equipment so that we can expand our capabilities somewhat.

I've been asked to put a list of three possibilities together, low-end, medium-end, and high-end. Since price points determine everything and this argument is for exploratory purposes and will help determine my budget, let's keep the high-end price point at $3,000. I know that severely limits my options when it comes to high-end cams, but we're still building a case for actually buying a camera in the first place. We also have an in-house production team that's located out of state if we ever wanted really high-end shoots, but they aren't available at moment's notice so I'm sort of looking for a stop-gap measure. Used equipment is fine IMO, but depends on my manager's feelings.

– I would like something high-def, but doesn't have to be 1080.
– We would want audio input to be a consideration. We aren't sound engineers, nor do we have that sort of equipment, but I would like to leave that sort of capability open for recording meetings, events, and interviews.
– Must be sensitive enough to work with available, indoor light (offices, conference rooms.)
– Must have the usual manual controls for focus, WB, exposure lock, etc.
– No tape-based workflow solutions. I would like to go directly from memory to workstation with no conversions, and don't want to have to purchase equipment or do camera capture.

I hope these are good points. Thanks a ton for any help and insight. Hopefully I can get something together so people can stop filming things on their Flip cams and iPhones!