Zoom H1essential

I bought this as an upgrade to my H1 first generation, received it today and called a saxophone playing friend to try it along loud percussions, and the "32 bits don't bother the gain just play" was immensely satisfying. We made two quick tests to find the right relative position and just peed the rec button and improvised, the result was as advertised, no clipping. Very handy recorder and an amazing upgrade to the previous generations. My friend who's also a producer and a sound engineer was pretty convinced too, and will probably get the H4essential or H6essential - despite the self noise which is not a problem in most contexts but we're sitting about a tenth of the price of a sounds device mix-pre6. This model is a must have for quick field or jam recording or backup ready to solution.
As a sound interface, unlike previous model it has dual recording and playing so it might be a cheap sound interface except it seems to be limited to 48 khz operation in this mode.

Quickly tried the overdub, it's fun and can come in handy, but only operates on 48KHz and had a few limitations. It is not destructive on the first track your overdubbing, that is it creates a new track with the overdub. Would be awesome to have two more tracks when overdubbing instead of one : the isolated overdubbed track and the mix as reference, to be able to properly mix later in a DAW.

As a hand device, even using the handle that came with the H1 accessory set, it's a bit delicate to not create noise, even squeezing a bit too tightly the handle results in heavy extra noise, the mics are very sensitive to the wind including the one when moving around, and without a pop filter you have to keep quite a distance to the mic to avoid clipping - so for short range voice either use a pop filter or external microphone, and for the wind or waving quickly the microphone from one side to another maybe a good rycote-like protection will be necessary.

Nevertheless, for my main purpose which is some girls recording and live musician recording with the least hassle, it definitely fits the goal, offer some extras and it's a huge upgrade to the previous versions. 5 stars overall, only 4 for quality because plastic, self noise and sensitivity to hand operations (no problem on a tripod) but still that's too be expected given the price tag.

I suppose it could run on a USB power bank which is great because with a 64gb card you're good for me than 21 hours of recording in 96kHz.
A perfect set of accessory would include charger/power bank/cable/tripod/bag for the recorder+accessories/adapters for mic stand/a stereo splitter cable/pop filter+adapter/foldable headphones

It's fine for recording interviews when you clean it up afterwards in software or AI. *Not* very good for recording performances off a mixer or interface via the 3.5mm input. It's only good for mics.

Standard DJ mixers need about -20db of gain reduction to work with the Zoom H1e, you can't plug this into a DJM and record off the REC OUT. There will be input overload and no recording or clipped audio, the 32-bit float can't save you here. Recordings will sound flatter than recording from DJ software directly.

There's no gain reduction (pad) on the Zoom so you'll need external attenuators or to record off an output with a separate volume control set to very low. Booth out is alright but that's usually in use for monitoring.

Standard AAA batteries last for around 3 hours while recording. Lithium ones last all night but will quickly end up costing more than the device. Use a 5V USB power source instead.

Transfers from the Zoom plugged in via USB-C to your laptop are slow. Stick your SD card into your laptop instead.

Mine ended up distorting on the left channel within about a year, sending it back.

Wish there was at least some level control, even just input padding. Noise is very noticeable on quiet sounds. But it does its job.

The killer-feature of this recorder is its size and the fact that you don't need to setup levels — take it out of the pocket, turn on (relatively quickly), it's already recording into the buffer, push the record button and start saving the sound + a few seconds before it.