Hmm. Reminds me of the infamous TI-82. Hundreds of thousands ended up being given free to public school districts, whose students quickly learned to remove and hoard the batteries after every use. Otherwise, it was a capable graphing calculator.

Well I just bought an H1 at Best Buy. The good news is that it sounds fantastic. The even better news is that it works with Sony type DC bias microphones such as those sold at microphonemadness.com. The bad news is that it must have been sitting on the shelf for a while because it appears to be one of the ones that eats batteries even when turned off.

I got my H1 from B&H (after waiting about a month for Amazon to ship) ... had it for a couple of weeks now .. and, yes, mine eats batteries .. not super fast, but fast enough. It is going back to Zoom for replacement.

The even better news is that it works with Sony type DC bias microphones such as those sold at
========
Laurence,

Which mics are good there?

John

Hi,

Just as an update. I had my two dysfunctional Zoom H1 recorders replaced by new ones. Now the power consumption when powered off is at a more reasonable level (the faulty ones consumed about 30 mA - even if powered off).

I measured the power-off current in the two new units. The idle current was in both about 165 microamperes. That is not exactly the best figure I have seen, and surprisingly high still...

In other words, a Duracell AA battery would run flat in about 270 days.

So be warned, take out the batteries from the Zoom H1 recorders if you do not plan to use them for a while!!! This is the recommended practice for most equipment, but most of us are too lazy to do that.... Now you have at least a good reason with these H1's :)

Christian

Hmm . . . perhaps they should rename it the Zoom TI-82.

Have noticed no such problems with my H4 -- batteries still fresh after a year.
Will be interesting to see if there are similar issues with the Q3HD -- I plan on getting one after the jury's in.

How long did it take to get your replacements? I'm still waiting for mine.

> I measured the power-off current in the two new units. The idle current was in both about 165 microamperes. That is not exactly the best figure I have seen, and surprisingly high still...

That's the problem with modern equipment with 'soft' power switches - the circuit needs a small amount of constant power to operate.
Same applies to 'standby' power in larger devices; an amazing amount of power is wasted!

Hi,

I'm in Finland, so returning the two units back to Germany (Musikhaus Thomann) took about one week (via snail-mail). I got the new units within one week after they received the faulty ones. I have to praise their customer service, the 30 days return period (with no questions asked) had already expired. Normally such units would be sent for warranty repair, and that can take ages... I got replacements without the repair despair ... after some emails with their after-sales. Anyhow, well done from their side!

Being heavily involved in electronics myself, I can claim that having a power off current at this level (160uA) is just proof of sloppy design, or proof of removing every cent from then cost. Its no trick to design a power supply that consumes much less than 1uA, but it costs some tens of cents... Zoom clearly made here some shortcuts...

Additionally, the quite high power consumption puzzles me, the units consumer about 130..150mA when recording. Zoom promises a 10 hour battery life, and that is probably just possible. Compare this to my 10 year old mini-disc that runs on one AA battery for 13 hours! That unit involves a rotating media and a laser pickup...

The Zoom H1 performs otherwise quite well, but its two weak points are the heavy power consumption (short battery life), and the microphones, that are very sensitive for even very small winds.

Christian

Here's some more info: http://cheesycam.com/zoom-h1-battery-drain/ "Supposedly there could be a bad batch of Zoom H1’s floating around with problem capacitors that will drain brand new batteries to almost nothing just overnight."

This is reminiscent of the "leaky capacitors on the motherboard" problem experienced by many PC makers several years ago. This is listed as "Capacitor Plague" in Wikipedia - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague " The first flawed capacitors were seen in 1999, but most of the affected capacitors were made in the early to mid 2000s. News of the failures (usually after a few years of use) forced most manufacturers to repair the defects and stop using the capacitors..."

At least the Zoom folks found & corrected this rather quickly.

...Jerry

The email I got back from Samson tech support made it sound like I was the first one to have a battery problem with my H1. None-the-less, they were prompt and courteous and offered to fix it right away. A higher level of customer service than you would expect from a sub $100 device/

Replace defective unit:

Well, I sent an e-Mail to Customer Service and the replied for me to call instead. I called and got a RA number. They sent FedEx to pick it up the next day and I got my replacement about a week later the same way.

Not sure how many units had the problem, but I'm sure all this cut into profits on this unit considerably. However, because of this quick service (and lack of any hint of it being "my fault" ) I won't hesitate to purchase something else from them in the future. My H1 joins my H2 (along with my Edirol R-09) in my arsenal of recorders.

Here's an interesting video of a "WindJacket" windscreen review for the H1:

http://www.camcorderuser.net/index.php/topic,792.msg7723.html#msg7723

Bif (Bruce) has been testing and providing feedback to thewindcutter.com on prototype versions of it.

I just wanted to mention that the replacement H1 recorder still eats batteries but at a much slower rate. Where the original one would go through a battery in a day or so of non use, the replacement will last a week or so (with the unit turned off in both cases). There is quite a bit of handling noise if you move your hands on the body of the unit, but it sounds fine otherwise. My Olympus LS10 can be handled quite freely, without the handling noise being picked up by the mics. On the H1 you really need to watch for this. Still a good deal though.