Holiday Gift Guide: Zoom H1 Handy Portable Digital Recorder

Posted December 08, 2017

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The Holiday Season is upon us. It's time to start thinking about (and buying) some gifts for the people in your life. Whether you are looking for a gift for a friend, family members, or yourself, we have some great ideas for you here at VJ. One such gift is the Zoom H1 Handy Portable Digital Recorder.

The Zoom H1 audio recorder is a great small, light-weight, digital device that offers great audio quality when you can't connect a microphone to your camera. Whether you are shooting video with a smartphone or DSLR capturing clean quality audio can be a challenge. When it comes to video, viewers can be very unforgiving of poor audio quality and your video will suffer if you don't have crisp, clean sound. While DSLR cameras and smartphones have microphones that you can buy to attach to them, because they don't have XLR inputs, and the lack of multiple audio inputs, your audio quality and quantity of sources suffers. In some cases you will want to use an external audio device and sync the audio in the edit. For those cases you'll want the Zoom H1.

The device has two mics on it for internal stereo pairing. Records Broadcast WAV (BWF) at 96kHz/48kHz/44.1kHz at 16-bit or 24-bit, and records MP3 from 48 to 320kbps for maximum recording time. It has a screen on it to monitor audio levels and a USB 2.0 port for easy transfer to your computer.

The important thing to remember if you are recording audio externally is so have a good way at the top of each clip to sync up your clips in the edit so that pairing the audio and video is not a tremendously tedious process. A method we like is to clap in the frame of the video and near the recorder at the start of each clip and line up the video and audio using the clap as a visual and audio cue.

Buy the Zoom H1 for $100 from Amazon.

Check out the rest of our Holiday Gift Guide here.