I'm pretty satisfied with YouTube's quality.
You can get some good quality video on there if you record using something like the Lagarith codec and then transcode the footage to x.264. 1 hour of footage at 1080P weighs in at around 1.7 - 2gb, which takes about an hour to upload to YouTube. The end result looks pretty decent.
I'm limited by the tools I have available, but I've found that encoding using Virtualdub/x.264 using high profile and Constant bit rate at 6000kbps results in much cleaner footage and smaller file size than, say, Windows Movie Maker 2012 h.264 output at 20,000kbps. The end result of which looks better once it's been processed b YouTube.