Are there cheap camcorders with adjustable focus?

I'm a film major entering my second semester of college. I've never been able to afford a camera to explore my film ideas. I've been looking at DSLR cameras, particularly the Nikon D3100, but they are expensive plus the cost of lenses and other accessories. I want to do some photography, but I'm willing to buy just a camcorder because that's what I need. The biggest problem I have is that I can't pull and rack the focus. This is a key feature that I need because I'm not filming my family's vacation to Disney Land, I plan of filming documentaries with many formalistic shots. I like the Canon Vixia HF M30 camcorder, but as far as I know it doesn't have that feature (if it does, please correct me). I want the option of manual focus, not just automatic focus. I understand that a camera is a worthwhile investment, but are there any consumer camcorders with manual focus options, or any more affordable DSLR cameras ( I would like to say 500$ or less on ebay, but I know that may be unreasonable)?

I would really recommend going for the DSLR. I have been shooting on the canon DSLRs for about a year, and I absolutely love the image. I have shot everything from documentaries in Africa to large scale music videos in Budapest, and I have yet to be disappointed. The T2i is really your best bet for features for the price. It might be a larger payment up front but you will be So glad with the images you get.

Aunsoft Final Mate, a great and useful camcorder assistant software, has everything needed to directly capture/backup AVCHD (*.mts, *.m2ts), AVCHD Lite, AVCCAM, NXCAM, TOD, MOD recordings from Hard Disk Drive/SD Card Camcorders to PC, to import, edit and create spectacular movies on a timeline. It is also powerful enough to play/convert native 1080 60p/50p footages and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround.

Powerful timeline-oriented editing features like split/trim video, splice clips, crop, do color correction, deinterlacing, replace audio, adjust volume, etc help you create satisfied film results. Merge/combine avchd (*.mts, *.m2ts), AVCHD Lite, TOD into only one file without any re-encoding or recompression.

Export/convert edited camcorder video to other editors (Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, WMM, Pinnacle Studio, etc), media devices (iPad, iPhone4, droid x, nokia n8, galaxy s, hdtv, projector, etc), or common formats (mov, avi, wmv, mp4, mpg, mpeg-2, etc) with the high quality and least amount of clicks. Ultra extreme performance with support for NVIDIA® CUDATM and Intel while encoding.