Barry,

I bought a Panasonic SDR-S10 that is almost exactly what you're describing. It's small - pack of 100's cigarettes sized. It's light - don't know how light since my scale died a horrible death by falling off the balcony railing - but it's well under a pound. Takes an SD or SDHC flash memory card (up to 32 GB). 1/6" CCD sensor, peaks out at DV resolution video. Can do wide screen 16:9 but you lose resolution. 10x optical zoom. Stereo 16-bit CD quality sound. Wind-noise electronic filter. Water-resistant to 1m. Survives drop test from 4-ft (according to manufacturer). Survived drop test from 10-feet onto rocky slope (according to me). YMMV.

The only criteria you mention that doesn't fit is that this camcorder uses a lithium battery pack, but they're light, last over an hour each, and are inexpensive (bought 2 on Ebay with a charger for $25).

Drawbacks? If you tripod mount, you have to unmount to change the battery or the memory card. MPEG2 format is a memory hog compared to the newer formats. 4 GB cards buy you 55 minutes of recording at the highest quality. Not much in the way of features, and no accessories (no hot shoe for a camera light, no remote control). It does OK at night, but high zoom leads to a lot of focus hunting. Image stabilization is electronic instead of optical, which means that above 6x zoom it's essentially useless. The video file has an MOV extension that a lot of older players and editors (including Quicktime) don't understand, but if you just rename the file with an MPG extension they play and edit just fine.

You might also look at the Xacti line - there are some SD card recorders there too. Most of these cameras are also available with hard drives, but I don't think those are very rugged. Panasonic also offers HD and 3-CCD variants of these camcorders, but we're talking $700 and up - and that's the discount shop price. Whatever you do, avoid buying any of the bargain-priced cameras from Aiptek - every one is problem-ridden and you will be unhappy with the video quality. You get what you pay for.