UPDATE: Firmware 3.0 addressed a number of my concerns. These have been indicated below.
UPDATE: After using the unit for a month, I have added three more ideas. Some of these are less critical than others, but I have edited the article to remove any attempt to grade them. Our priorities are all different!
In my
first article I discussed my justification for buying a Zoom F8, and gave a handy overview of the features. No doubt this multichannel recorder offers the best bang-for-the-buck of any on the market, while not compromising on professional features: time code, pull-down and pull-up sync rates, dual SD card slots, and so on.
But no matter how good a recorder is out of the box, there is room for improvement. I was encouraged to buy a Zoom F8 because of the feature set and pricing, but the deciding factor was the firmware updates. Zoom looked at the critiques after the first months of availability and issued Firmware 2.00, which added many useful features. A further 2.10 update fixed more bugs.
In this field, a company that cares about their customers should be willing to enhance their hardware beyond initial release. Anything else is a wasteful approach to hardware that, let's face it, uses up precious resources from our environment. I like to use a piece of kit for as long as possible!
Zoom have shown that they care... and have me as a customer as a result. The signs are encouraging that this policy will continue, and so I present my list of requests, restricted to those that can be implemented without hardware changes.