Marantz PMD620

Part of my job as a media technician requires that I stay up to date on the latest AV technology. This week I got my hands on the new Marantz PMD620 digital voice field recorder. The unit is about the size of a pack of cigarettes and weighs about 4 ounces with the batteries installed. You also get an AC adapter and a holder that functions as a belt clip or a tripod mount. It records in WAV or MP3 format and comes with a 512MB SD card. It retails for about $399.

The only thing I don't like about it, is the 5 hour battery life. Other voice recorders will operate for at least 8 hours on a set of batteries. The PMD620 will produce a higher quality audio file than most voice recorders. But, Yamaha just came out with the Pocketrak 2G, which will produce CD quality files and run for nine hours with a rechargeable battery. The other feature that is starting to appear in recorders of this size is ALC (auto level control). This is an important feature for voice recording, because without ALC, recordings can be too loud or too soft, making microphone placement more critical.

This week I updated the Budget Hompage web site with a wider, cleaner looking design. I found that working with CSS templates can be a serious pain. Dreamweaver MX is unable to render a page properly if it is made entirely with CSS code. If you want to adjust the size of anything, you have to edit an external CSS file and then preview your change in a browser. This can take forever if you are trying to resize content on a page. Until I find an editor that will provide simple CSS editing control, I'm going to stay clear of it.