A Look at the Zoom H2 Handy Recorder

I was able to demo the Zoom H2 Handy Recorder at the Podcast and New Media Expo today and think I might have another portable recorder in my pocket real soon.  Right now, I’m walking around with a H4, but the little H2 (about the size of a deck of cards) seems to have the same sound quality for less money.  I think if you don’t need the features of the H4 (like multitracking), I’m going to have to say that the H2 is my top pick for highly-portable recording right now.

The unit comes with a small tabletop stand, an adapter that allows it to be mounted on a mic stand, a windscreen, a 512mb SD card.  It will handle a 4 GB card (awesome) and that will get you six hours of 44.1kHz recording or, they say, 138 hours in MP3 format.  Whoa!  Here’s a tip though, you’ll only get four hours of life from the 2 AA batteries that power it… so you’ll need to plug it in if you’re recording that long. It comes with an external power supply.

If you want use it for sound recordings, the unit even has a built in tuner and metronome.  Multiple people or instruments?  It has three microphones, one in the center and two on either side, this not only allows for stereo imaging, but you can also record from the front or rear… even doing Surround 5.1.

The only thing that the guys selling it at the expo said people complain about is the small buttons and interface.  You know… I think I can deal with that for the amount money it costs: $200.  I think the cost, the portability, and the sound quality that I listened to during the demo make up for it.  Also, if the volume is too low when you record, you can actually normalize it.

Here’s a link to the manufacturer site: http://www.samsontech.com/products/productpage.cfm?prodID=1916

This is a great review on O’Reilly Digital Media: http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2007/09/13/review-zoom-h2-surround-recorder.html