I have been thinking about buying a Zoom H2 recorder. I know some of you have them. What do I need to know before I decide to buy one? Pros? Cons? Good, bad, indifferent?

I use an H4 to record services and it works great. Very straightforward, good quality recording. I bought a larger memory card. The one it shipped with was far too small to be practical.

I also have a Zoom G2 guitar processor I've been happy with. Overall good experiences with Zoom gear.

My H2 really gets the job done. You can hook it up to your computer and record onto it, or use a flash card like jrc said. It records in stereo, as their are two condenser microphones pointed in two different directions on one side, and two more on the other side pointed even further apart. Fantastic sound for a field recorder.

Well .... gotta say a couple of things that could be considered on the con side. The H2 picks up EVERYTHING when you use it as a microphone -- breathing, swallowing, moans over a missed note, ringing phones. The real down side for me was that I couldn't get the playback to go through the computers speakers. The earphones gave me a tiny delay from what Audacity was playing so making two tracks didn't work ... for me.

Reading the directions might have been helpful ...

Records great, but requires earphones to listen ... or you wait until after it is downloaded to the computer. Seems to be very easy on batteries. FWIW, I haven't used it to record any live music/group(s) yet. That is supposed to be one of its strongest points.

Thanks for the remarks guys. I haven't completely made up my mind on the purchase. However we just got a new request for bead packaging so if it is as much aas he said on the phone then I can buy the H2 and a flute.

bead packaging?

We package beads into the strings or plastic bags you see in a bead shop. We get them in various forms and then package them for display and sale. This is a once in a while job. All money is split equally between us. It is our free to spend on anything we want money. Our last group was during the big snow. We had a little over 2000 8 inch strings of beads. THe latest one says it will probably be around 10000.