Zoom H1essential Stereo Handy Recorder (2024 Model, Essential Series) with 32-Bit Float, Accessibility, X/Y Microphones, USB Microphone, Portable, for Musicians, Podcasters, Filmmakers

The delivery was late; the product is good. One needs to buy wind shield (foam and/or dead cat), batteries, memory card and a decent box cover, also earphones, if one has to live check the feed; all of this adds to the cost, but you won’t regret it. This is the best recorder you can get at such price; with 32-bit float you don’t clip any audio, you always have that headroom to adjust. But that doesn’t mean you can stick it to a loud DJ speaker. The microphone captures sound from everywhere around, but dominates whatever is ahead of it, and closer the source, louder the sound of it. So, it’s good for almost everything - room tone, foley, ambience, instrument playing, news-like interview with microphone close to one’s mouth, etc. If one has to jump to professional side, like with dialogue for films, you can capture it as a back up sound, to studio record the dialogues again. If one cannot spend extra on good shotgun microphone, a field recorder, a boom pole, a man to hold that boom and move along the cast, one can use this same product to record the dialogues again in a room with lower noise pollution, for dialogues to be clearer; it just adds a degree of work hours to record and sync, but one can do it, if one has to start with what one has or what one can afford. Also the low reliability of wireless lavalier microphones make it difficult to spend on those; so, this works well as a temporary starting point. One can use the same for voice over/narration for documentaries or YouTube videos, with least worry. This recorder is like ‘add batteries, turn me on, set the date, hit record and you get the best result of all that sounds around’, as simple as that !!

Great little recorder. All my needs are met with just one equipment. Good value for money.

I recently purchased the Zoom H1essential sound recorder from Amazon.in, and I'm quite pleased with my purchase. As expected, Amazon delivered it on time, which is always a great start. At a price of ₹8,689, this portable and handy stereo sound recorder offers excellent value for money. The sound quality is impressive for this price point, and it perfectly serves my purpose. However, it's important to note that the package only includes the Zoom H1essential sound recorder. It does not come with any accessories such as wind screens, cables, or even the necessary AAA batteries, which you will need to purchase separately. For those interested, I've included a photo of the unboxed Zoom H1essential sound recorder alongside its packaging to give you a better idea of what to expect. Overall, I'm satisfied with this purchase and would recommend it to anyone looking for a budget-friendly, high-quality sound recorder.

Vocal quality very good

Though this was the first mic I purchased, I watched a lot of reviews online before buying it. But it performs really well. you do have to get a dead cat, if you want good motorcycling audio, but you're done. Just choose between stereo or mono and you're good to go. It's not studio level, obviously, but it performs much better than what I expected considering the price I paid. 10/10 woudl recommend this as a first mic.

Wow nice

The product comes bare essentials on how to use & tons of problems. Changed batteries twice because it switches off on its own. Their onion manual doesn’t help you with all the potential issues you will face & although my purchase has replacement option till 31st Jan, unable to do that because I get a message you cannot return it at the moment!! If I knew it has so many difficulties, I wouldn’t have bought it - in this day of ease of use directly out of the box, this is a bit of a dinosaur. I expect eventually it will be replaced by more user friendly product design. Very customer unfriendly product. If you have lot of time and patience, maybe you can try. My experience is rather disappointing.

Why did you pick this product vs others?: The product itself is good. But the Warranty is only valid in Japan and not in India. That should have been mentioned in the product details. So far, I have used it to capture a lot of house object sounds. There is some self-noise, but I usually clean it in post using Izotope RX 11. One of the biggest pluses is the 32-bit recording. I don't have to worry about getting too close to the mic while recording and distorting the sound. You don't wanna get too close, otherwise there will be plosives. If you play the recorded audio in your editing software/DAW, it will sound distorted since most audio playback devices are still 24-bit. But you can recover the dynamics of the audio file by just turning the gain down.