No experience as yet, though I'm tempted (but firmly resisting until I've had a chance to play with one or talk to someone I can trust who has). Were I running a professional studio rather than a hobby enterprise, I'd probably have one already, mind.

Yes. The H4. Recommended.

It's compact, intuitive to operate and you can vary the quality you need depending on how long you want to record for and the type of sound you are recording.

At it's best quality, though it doesn't give you long (IIRC about 40 minutes), it's superb and is fine for all but real commercial stuff.

It's also very flexible in the that it can be used with other equiment. Ours was £200 via some firm on the net last year.

My only criticism might be that the instruction booklet is a bit long-winded and convoluted - but as it's so intuitive to operate, a brief look, plus a quick demo from a mate, was all I needed.

S-S!

It's a long while since we've seen you here, SS!

I use an H2 rather than a 4, and find it a useful little tool: as I've mentioned before, its biggest drawback is that its Line In level is non-standard, so that it clips if you feed it a standard linlevel signal, but once attenuated it's fine - I use it to transfer cassettes to digital when it's not being used for field work or for voice-overs.

I got an H4 about a year ago, and an H2 last autumn. The H2 is very handy and compact and can do a form of surround recording using its 120 degree 'rear' and 90 degree 'front' facing mics. The H4, however, is my preferred recorder, since it can take decent condenser mics and provide them with full 48 volt phantom power. Both devices, however, are designed down to a price and there have been recent concerns about clock drift with them. This is mainly a problem for use in video work, and there are ways of compensating for it in post production, but it is worth thinking about.

There is a active discussion forum for the H4 and H2 at http://www.2090.org/zoom/bbs/viewforum.php?f=15&sid=a4dbee8b846291e10dfceb25eec1f209

I too am rather tempted by the Korg.

Oh, and to follow up SS!'s point about maximum file duration, at the top rate of 96/24, the 2GB file limit means a recording time of 62 minutes 8 seconds. I know because I accidentally left my H4 set to 96/24 for a recording job a couple of weeks ago. The session went straight through for about 65 minutes, and I had to do a retake of the last few minutes as the file closed automatically at the 2GB limit, leaving me with a 62 minutes  8 seconds initial take. In such circumstances the H4 does open a new file and continue to record, but a gap of around 20 seconds (sometimes rather longer) occurs before the new file is opened. Since tests reported on the forum linked to above have indicated that on the H4 there is little if anything to be gained from using the 96k sample rate, rather then 48k, it might be best to regard 2 hours, 4 minutes and 16seconds as the practical upper file duration. With the appropriate firmware upgrade(s), SDHC cards of up to 16GB can be used, but the 2GB limit on individual files remains.

Here is a link to the FULL INFO - re 1 bit recording at a sample rate of 5.6 MHz from the Korg website. It is a 10 page .pdf document. Hope it is of interest - I'm very impressed so far.

http://www.korg.co.uk/products/digital_recording/mr/Future_Proof_Recording_Explained.pdf

Is this machine worth getting? Looks like a world beater?

Future proof?

I can confirm the periodic digital peaks Bryn mentions - My recorded sound files look a lot like his. I've never been able to hear them though - I can only see that they're there in sound editing programs. Still, they might interfere with any processing one wanted to do with the files (ie they might be exaggerated by certain digital processes) so it's good to be aware that they're there.