What follows are my first impressions of the portable digital flash recorder, the Zoom H4. If you don’t care about recording, or don’t care about the H4, give this one a miss. Otherwise, read on…

First let me apologize for not posting any audio or pictures of the Zoom H4. I’m not at that stage yet. I just got it in the mail and a few things impressed me so I figured I’d throw up some of my thoughts.

For reference, my old mic was an Azden SGM-2x. I bought it five years ago and today it still it goes for roughly the same price, around $200. It has a shotgun and a condenser capsule, which is why I bought it, for the flexibility. It’s been used at weddings, used for some voice overs, and it’s even been used on some nationally syndicated television shows. I’ve put it through the paces, and I must say, it’s a decent mic, but it seems to pick up far too much noise, good sometimes but not good for the voice-over stuff I’m working on now. I generally use it with my Canon XL1 and record to DV, or I use my M-Audio Black Box and record to computer. I was looking into a M-Audio mic, a Luna perhaps, and noticed it needs to be phantom powered. The Black Box doesn’t do phantom power, why not I don’t know. So I started looking at other options, and I stumbled across the H4. It looked promising, but I didn’t have the cash to spare or the need for it.

Well, now I have both and ordered it yesterday, Amazon got it here today. First of all, genius. Genius. I love this thing already. It looks a little odd, looks a little cheap (and $260 for what it does is somewhat cheap). It has two sockets for XLR inputs. These two sockets also fit a 1/4″ jack, so you can use a cheaper mic or plug a standard guitar cable in. That’s right, XLR or 1/4″ jack in one socket. Pretty slick.

As I implied earlier, it does phantom power, it records on a SD card or you can plug it in via USB and record in your computer. It also has two built in mics, in standard crossed formation, for stereo recording. The chrome mics (and the wire guard around them) makes the thing look like a stun gun.

The H4 debuted, I think, in 2006, and the firmware has been updated as recently as February, 2008. They’ve fixed a lot of bugs, they changed the whole screen layout so the menus would be easier to navigate, and they added support for SDHC cards, among other things.

Here’s what surprised me out of the box: The H4 came with newest firmware loaded on. Not unusual but not standard by any means. It also came with an AC adapter. That’s expected but many companies seem to think providing an AC adapter (for battery-operated devices) is optional nowadays. Device came with a 512MB SD card. I knew about this in advance but it’s worth mentioning. Device also came with printed manual! Very strange to get a full printed manual, usually you just get a CD and a quick start guide. In addition to the manual, you also get a few pamphlets. One with recording advice, mic placement for certain situations as well as the best mic settings. Another sheet listed all the changes made with firmware updates (firmware changes aren’t reflected in the manual, I don’t think) as well as the dates the firmware was changed.

Now let’s go to the sound. I expected the on-board mics to sound good. There are audio tests floating around, live recordings and such, podcasts recorded on the H4 to check out. I’ve only done a few minutes of testing so far, in the same environment I record with my Azden. Let me just say, the mics on this thing sound great. Amazing. At the lowest sensitivity there is no room noise yet my voice is still fairly loud. There is a lot of noise at the highest sensitivity (duh) and I can see it would be great for even acoustic live shows. I’ve very impressed. As I said earlier, I was going to buy a new mic, now I may not need to.

As for compression options, mic simulation, etc, I haven’t tried any of that, nor have I tried an external mic yet. I probably will over the next few days but unless I get any really awful results I probably won’t write about it.

All in all I’m very satisfied with this device and looking forward to using it in the future.