Accessories

Bill Me Later
The BILL-ME-LATER $10 for $50 discount is a DIRTY TRAP to get your personal information. It will tell you "It can not apply to this production..." after you filled in your information. It didn't ask you much but only YOUR NAME and ADDRESS, and then it denied you (I'm sure it denies everyone) after it got your info.

I bought a H4 last year and it is a great handy recorder. Now the "Bill Me Later" is making this product and Amazon look BAD.

This is not about that $10 discount but the principle and honestness. Now I've changed my mind not to buy one more H4 from Amazon. I have been buying a lot from the Amazon although I know there are many other online places where I could get the same product with less. Amazon gave me confidence of buying from them. Now now I'm doubt... Well, enough about this.

Thanks and God Bless You All !

Good all around performer
The Zoom H4 has performed very well for me in recording live music sessions. The quality range of 3 wav levels and 1 mp3 is good. The features are excellent but the controls are very compact and take a good deal of getting used to.
The only downside I feel is the short battery life. Using 2 AA alkaline batteries I can get 2-3 hours of recording time and then the recorder dies while there is still a lot of juice in the batteries for other applications. So I presently have a collection of about 50 AA batteries which are still good for running toys and flashlights but don't have high enough voltage for the H4. This is a small inconvenience - overall the unit is excellent.

weird package but great features and sound
I read all the reviews before buying this thing and at first i was worried of some of the problems people were having with it. Mostly firmware related, a lot has been fixed, they ship with version 2.2 and gripes like level setting memory,card problems,and conversion errors are gone. Battery life with 2500 maH batteries was 6 hours! 8 gig cards do indeed work. Batteries are in a crappy place and if you need to swap your card, THEN you do lose your settings...=( menu while funky was rather easy after a while. Headphone volume could be better. usb 1.1 sucks audio quality at the 96khz with built in mics are really clear phantom power mics work great. And it does actually record at 96khz. a reviewer previously said it doesn't...

Nice unit
I bought this recorder upon a recommendation of some friends on a forum I frequent. It was purchased mainly to record acoustic and classical guitar practice sessions. The internal microphones are very sensitive and pick up very well. I haven't tried external mics on it yet. The ability to record as an MP3 file is very convenient and easy to send over the internet.

Things that would improve the unit include:

It would be nice to have a built in speaker for preview. There is a standard iPod sized earphone jack you can plug in to for preview and playback, but other than that, you have to take the card out and connect it to your computer, etc. to listen back.

Removing the SD card is difficult due to the placement right between the batteries. It's hard to get ahold of the card. You also have to open the battery compartment to get to it and the batteries are loosely mounted so you cant use gravity to help with the card or the batteries fall out. Both minor annoyances.....

All in all, it is a nice unit and worth the money. It has MANY features I will probably never use but the quality of recording for my use is exceptional.

Frustrating Control Buttons
I purchased the recorder primarily to use as a sketch pad and practice tool. I liked the idea of having multiple track recording capabilities. Unfortunately, the product did not work for me. While trying to record multi-track I found the control buttons to be sticky and non-responsive in a random sort of way. As a result I just couldn't get the hang of using them. That made working through the menus difficult and frustrating...the last thing I needed when trying to make a recording. I ended up returning the item.