Zoom H1n Handy Recorder (2018 model) N/A - Beige, M

I urgently needed something to record some interviews and thought I would get this because it would do more than just basic spoken word. I made my own windshield (it is a bit 'poppy') from some thin foam I had lying around, and it sits happily on the smallest of my photographic tripods (or a big one if you want to sing into it :-)). Does a good job on spoken word, and on MP3 96 kbps (fine for that) gives plenty of time on the micro sd card. So - what makes it brilliant for the money? As a hand held or tripod mounted recorder it's excellent for only £80. My son plays drums, copes with that really well as long as you set the record level manually - leaving it on Auto not too clever. Then I thought I would see what else it could do. We did a quick trial using our Apogee mono microphone mounted low, played into a macbook, the Zoom H1 mounted high up over the cymbals and a video recording on a DSLR - put it all together in Mac garageband in a few minutes and it is excellent. Not studio standard (what do you expect for £80) but about a trillion times better than the camera microphone. What else? You know how some laptops have soundcards with very limited functionality - you can't record 'what you hear' and there is no decent line in. Plug the zoom line in into the laptop headphone socket usinf a male to male mini fjack lead and you can get very high quality MP3 recordings which you can then transfer back to the laptop as a file for editing or saving. Or you just use the line in on the Zoom and transfer the MP3 file to the laptop. A way to timeshift. Need to be careful with copyright of course. Probably just as effective as an external USB soundcard would be. And - much to my amazement - I found it did a decent job of recording from my old record deck - magnetic cartridge -using a phono to mini-jack adaptor, straight in and no need for a pre amp. Monitor using headphones from the zoom line out and although the zoom input level was cranked up above half way it was nowhere near the maximum. Looks like I will be able to play my ancient vinyl jazz collection in the car after all. So - what's not to like? I agree with the comments that the case is a bit creaky when handled, and the internal speaker is useful only to confirm that you have captured something, its otheriwse useless. You need headphones or line out to really hear it. Trying to transfer files using the micro SD carrier into my laptop SD slot didn't seem to work, didn't persevere because using a USB cable was fine and you can treat it just like any external flash drive - copy, move, delete and so on. The cable is a mini usb at the Zoom end - but nothing unusual, lots of devices have that and most people will have one lying around but it would be nice if one was supplied. But, hey it's a budget device. 15 years sgo something that performs like this would have been £5000 and the size of a suitcase. Well pleased.

The H1 is very basic in terms of the functionality it offers, compared to other more expensive recorders on the market, but given its price that is hardly surprising. The H1 is probably unique in that it has a completely menu free user interface - everything you do with the recorder you do using controls located on the fascia. In some ways this is quite refreshing, particularly for anyone with previous battle experience when it comes to dealing with impenetrable layers of menus. However, this is primarily what limits its functionality. You can do all the basic things you need to e.g. setting sample/bit rates (from 24bit/96k down to Mp3), and adjusting recording and volume levels. Line in (mic), line out (headphone) sockets, delete, play, fast forward and reverse buttons are also on the edge of the fascia along with a recording button which is located on its own on the front of the fascia. The H1 offers one button recording using the recording button, which you also press to stop recording and return to the home screen. Recordings are made to a 2Gb micro SD card (supplied) and the recorder is powered by a single AA battery. Physically the H1 is about 4.5 ins long, 1.3 ins wide and 0.8 ins deep. Many of its controls are located along the right edge of the recorder which makes for a tight fit - consequently the buttons are small. Anyone with very large fingers may struggle. The recorder is also very light and I would guess mostly made from plastic. I would not want to suggest that its build quality is poor but you might not want to step on it too often. If you can access the small buttons the H1 is actually very easy to use. The only real downside for me in its menu free operation is that if you have a number of recordings on the machine there is no way to visually scroll through them to select a specific one; you have to listen to them all to find the one you want. Note also that if you are at the home screen pressing the fast forward or reverse buttons will change the sample/bit rate, and it is easy to do this accidentally. The digital recorder market is one that is rapidly expanding and there are a lot of models out there. So why buy this recorder in preference to others? Firstly it is being sold at a low price point that no other recorder can match so if you are on a budget it is a bargain. Secondly, and more importantly, you might want to buy it for the quality of its condenser mics. They are absolutely outstanding. I am familiar with a number of recorders such as the Olympus LS10 and Tascam's DR-2d (see my review). The H1's mics simply blow them away. I record acoustic guitar which is notoriously difficult to capture well. The H1 manages it effortlessly with a degree of accuracy and a complete lack of colouration which left me quite astonished. To date these are the best internal mics I have encountered and this alone makes the H1 a must buy. If I lost this recorder I would have no hesitation in buying it again.

The Zoom H1 is remarkably compact. The recording quality from the internal mics and using the line input is very good indeed. I suspect that the mics are not quite as good as those in the H2 or H4 but so far I have no complaints re the quality of the recording produced. Build quality is reasonable but not as good as the other Zooom units and fitting the Micro SD card and the batteries needed a bit more care than I felt appropriate. I really like the controls being buttons and switches instead of it being menu driven like the H2 and H4. Just don't try to adjust anything whilst recording - the unit is very very susceptable to handling noise. It is almost impossible to get a noise free hand held recording. However when used with the supplied mic stand adapter or screwed onto a tripod and it does the job admirably well. It is a great wee unit. One essential additional purchase will be a good wind shield for outdoor use. The supplied one is just about ok for indoor use but no use at all outside in anything greater that a light breeze. So far the supplied tripod has survived OK but it does seem a bit fragile.

As a musician who does Electronica, acoustic stuff and plays live, I cannot rate the Zoom H1 highly enough. I bought it a few months ago when I was looking for an affordable hard-drive recorder for taping gigs and to record vocal stuff without the horrible hiss that my main sound card and all external ones I'd bought thus far had failed to eliminate but there's so much more to it than that It can be used as a solo recorder with either condenser input for recording acoustic audio or dynamic input (with a decent dynamic mic) for solo vocal input. The sound quality is excellent. Files can be saved as wav or mp3 depending on what you want. It stores recordings on a 1gb mini SD card (provided with mine) so MP3 is best for long recordings, but WAV works well for shorter things. It can also be used as an external sound card to wire vocal and instrument input directly in to any decent DAW I wrote this [...] with it. It's class, it's under a ton and I'm about to but another one.

(Update) Zoom UK replaced my H1 recorder due to the battery drain problem. My original H1 would drain a new battery in 2 days when switched off. The replacement uses 110 microamperes when switched off - so a new battery will last around 2 weeks. This could be inconvenient if you reached for the recorder to find it dead. So, I would recommend only fitting the battery when required but the next problem arises - you can't start recording because when no battery was installed the date and time was lost. Now you have to tediously re-set the date (wearing a pair of close up spectacles as the characters are so tiny) before you can start. If you can't find your specs - or just don't care, you can simply wait a while and it eventually accesses the card and you can begin to record (by which time you've forgotten the idea you had or the person talking has walked off...) Original review: Having previously bought Zoom products, I suppose I did feel steered by brand loyalty to some extent in making this purchase. When I unboxed it I was slightly shocked by the flimsy build quality - it feels like a toy... The texture of the plastic shouts "cheap" and with small screen, fiddly small buttons on the side and tacky card and battery hatches I wasn't impressed. Admittedly the compact dimensions make it convenient to carry and use without drawing attention, but ease of use suffers with the legibilty of tiny characters in the display and the small buttons which should (at least) be colour coded to help selections. The buttons would have much more usefully placed on the top surface so that it could then be operated single-handed with the thumb activating the controls. Further options are chosen by a row of slider switches on the bottom but these are stupidly placed near the mics. This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't rattle (they are slightly loose). Consequently, when hand holding you must keep your fingers clear of them during recording. The mics will also pick up the tiniest movement of your hand, and as the casing flexes and creaks it can all add up to be pretty annoying. If you were recording loud sounds I dare say these would be buried low in the mix by comparison, but for quieter recording hand held is not good. While monitoring recordings with headphones, I was surprised by the amount of hiss - this got me worried, but thankfully when the files are played back on the computer they are clean. The headphone circuit is obviously not a low noise design. Navigating your way around the recorded tracks is tedious. If you have a long track of say 1 hour and you want to listen to the last 5 minutes you have to hold down the tiny fast-forward button for ages. If you jump to the next track and hold down rewind it will not reverse into the last portion of the previous track - it just stops. I found the battery life disappointing. 10 minutes into the first recording, the battery level dropped by a third. After about 1 hour of use it was empty. The short battery life was partly due to monitoring the recording with the headphone output. However, see top of page for battery drain when switched off... This recorder has been around a while and needs a complete re-design. Recordings are good, but build quality, circuit design and controls need to be improved.

If you are mildly tecnophobic or have much better things to do with your spare time – its always nice to get up and running swiftly! instructions were totally inadequate on what proved the most diffcult part of getting up and going - inserting the microscopic MicroSD card (black on black port, extremely flimsy, with no helpful markings of any kind). If MicroSD cards are unfamiliar or you do not have perfect eyesight – you may have a problem. The door rotates about the bottom outer corner. It needs to be prised up with a small tool, on the opposite diagonal and may spring closed again and as I said is very flimsy. With the port open at last – expect no instructions on how to insert the tiny card itself (which end goes where). This link was about the most useful on this topic because of the photographs http://familyoralhistory.us/news/view/unboxing_my_zoom_handy_h1_portable_recorder/ Why don’t Zoom cover this in detail on their web site and offer more detailed you-tube type ‘get up and going’ instructions. When designing brilliantly cheap technology, why be cheapskate on the set-up and operating instructions – a vital part of the deal. I used it as a quick spare of the moment capture device for musical ideas. Recording formats 6 wav formats (combinations of bit rate and Khz/sec) but only 1(?) will play on the standard CD 16/44 format (ie two-channel 16-bit PCM encoding at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate per channel) and many players – so like me you may end up with many tracks in unplayable formats and you cannot set a format as the playable format as a default. The player will not even stay in the chosen format when switched on and off ie it tends to arbitrarily jump formats between takes creating unplayable tracks. I found I could convert formats on line eg http://audio.online-convert.com/convert-to-wav but it is time consuming. Zoom themeselves should offer that feature. Ease of selection of tracks for playback –3/10 on playback it defaults to the most recent track and will then automatically play every track on it in rotation! – it is far from easy to get to the track – say a brief reminder of a riff you want. If playing tracks on headphones, the recorder gives good SQ, however the microphone monitor is permanently on which is a bit disconcerting and a battery eater. Sound Levels 4/10 The recording level even when set to the maximum V 100 can be too low and it is difficult to achieve the desired loudness. The auto level recording feature is far too slow to adapt and likewise produces unpredictably erratic and surprisingly variable recording levels, too loud and suddenly dropping. (Given the device is a battery eater spending several minutes setting a level is not good) Sound quality 8/10 - Gives perfectly clear, clean undistorted natural 2 channel stereo. Very different from the highly compressed, brightly equalised sound on most cheap recorders, and consequently may seem rather low level on play back. Sounds at its best played back on a hi fi. Inbuilt speaker SQ 2/10 - v v poor Records on MicroSD card (supplied). Instructions – sketchy, microscopic font. 3/10 basic monitor head phones NOT supplied Buttons could be larger and much more clearly marked. Why do designers have this anti-functional fixation with black on black buttons? Visibility 2/10 Record button is large / designed for simplicity of use – I found it quirky - sometimes had to be pressed TWICE to kick on or off irritating when losing some good takes Heavily features twin mic Stereo sound – not sure if that is so useful for quick capture the moment demos? Two separate plug in mikes would be far better to record a 2 way conversation or Vocal + guitar or keyboards. Be aware Connects to PC with USB connection – NOT supplied. The Wavelab sound editing software supplied requires at least Windows 7 – won’t work on older computers. 5 of the 6 wav recording formats may not be playable on a lot of basic older software or CD players. Durability – 4/10. Not look to last! I would give it 2.5 stars for the use I put it to. However mine became unusable after less than a year – giving a ‘no card’ warning – very frustrating. I wasted £10 replacing the card but alas this did not cure the fault! So in the circs I can only give it 1.5 stars (I used it as a quick spare of the moment capture device for musical ideas for which I can’t recommend it) Overall I feel it falls slightly in between two stools – the cheap instant sound-grabber and the more expensive feature rich recorders. The lack of compression means as a sound grabber it is not ideal and the difficulty of getting good recording levels and sound balance means it is not very sophisticated.

Ok to say that 'I hate this product' it is putting it a bit harsh. I think this is a perfectly good digital recorder but with some really bad corner cutting. For example the plastic protective cage around the mics is extremely fragile. I would say poorly designed, or at the least seemed designed to break. they will shatter on a 4ft fall (table top) to the floor. To my mind.. poorly designed. Zoom customer service will want to charge you £58 to fix a broken piece of plastic, and tell you it is not their responsibility to fix within the year warranty... basically 'take it back to where you bought it'. I don't think that i will bother getting it repaired as this price.. given that the microphones on the unit are not that good (nor should they be at this price to be honest). Still works great when you plug in external microphones. product: 3/5. zoom support: 0/5

What a brillant sound recorder, and cheap too, the sound quality is pretty good, records in WAV and or MP3. I use it for film shoots so its pretty neat to put in your camera bag. Only drawback is it can pick up the wind too much but with a fury windjammer thar should sort it. Its easy to use with a simple menue wich it what you need when on a tight timescale. One touch record and stop and can be mounted on a mic stand. It is howerver power hungry when recording in Wav so make sure you have plenty of battaries at hand if you are useing a lot. But it was a great purchase if you are on a megger low budget. A big thums up from me.