Digital Camera /w video pluged in

Hi all.

Ive been poking around for a new Digital Camera. The one I have now takes great pics, but is more of a photography camera rather than an everyday one (its rather bulky). Its a Sony Cybershot DSC-S70

The problem with it is, it doesn't like taking videos. It will at most take 15 second clips. It will not let me take longer videos, despite having plenty of memory for it.

I know cameras these days do not have that limitation, however from what i have seen, most are rigged now to where you cannot run the camera with it plugged into the wall. All the ones ive seen (that are just every day cameras) require you to either put them on a dock to charge, or remove the battery completely to charge it. What i would like to find, is a digital camera that will allow me to take long videos, while being plugged into the wall and mounted on a tri-pod, in addition to just acting like a regular camera. Reason being we want to start taking videos of our Lan Partys and other events. But id rather not spend all the money to get a Harddrive camcorder.

Any ideas?

Also, for the lan party's specifically, i am considering a high rez webcam, however i am not certain what kind of impact on gaming, recording a video that way would have on my system. Also, a lan isnt the only time i could use to record videos.

I believe the reason that the small pocket cameras can only record short clips is it caches the video on internal memory then writes it to your media card when it stops. My Canon Powershot works the same way. It won't go past 30 seconds at lowest resolution and higher resolutions reduce the time accordingly even though there's a 1GB card in the camera that could hold a lot more than that. (For example I traveled to London for a Killing Joke concert and recorded the first 30 seconds of each song mostly so I could compile a set list when it was all over ... the quality was awful of course and even I could barely stand to go over it but it worked for that purpose - I got 30 video clips on there plus a whole day's worth of sightseeing photos easily on that 1GB ... only the battery was running out in the end.

I was thinking webcam too. Or just get a dedicated digital camcorder the prices have come down quite a bit.

I'm not aware of any digital snapshot cameras that allow for long video record times.

We had one at the party, im asking my friend for the brand/model

Just google for pocket camcorder - they can also take stills but their main thing is video.
I saw an unbranded one the other day selling for £120 - it was TINY - yet was still fully-featured.