( 10 reviews )
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Posted: Jun 7 2009
I haven't used the microphone in a real situation yet but did experiment with a few shots, so far it sounds good and I can hear a distinct difference. For the price I paid I think it is worth it. Who can complain if the cost is less then $5.00 compaired to more than a hundered dollars for the Canon mic and people who used it said there isn't a big difference.
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Posted: Sep 9 2008
I have an Elura 100 for shooting home movies. Although the built-in microphone is pretty good, as far as such things go, it still picks up a little bit of motor noise, and is only really good at close range. With that in mind, I thought that an external, directional, microphone would be useful. On a whim, I purchased the Sima MZM1 at my local large electronics store, which, believe it or not, stocked it as its only external microphone on the shelves. I hadn't heard of Sima, but figured that even an inexpensive (actually, I paid more than the Amazon price), directional microphone would be better than the built-in microphone. Boy was I wrong. I set the camera up in a quiet room with no wind noise and ran a sound check first with the built-in microphone, and then with the Sima in both normal and "zoom" mode. The built-in microphone sounded as good as ever, clear with a slight trace of motor noise. Then, as soon as I plugged in the Sima microphone, the noise level increased dramatically. In normal mode, I not only picked up the motor whir substantially louder, I also picked up a substantial amount of buzz and other hissing/buzzing noise. In zoom mode, the motor whir was gone, but that was possibly because it was drowned out by even louder hissing/buzzing noise. At first I thought that perhaps it was the fact that the Elura's electronic wind screen is deactivated for external microphones, so I turned it off for the built-in microphone and repeated the test with the same results. At this point I began to think that my mic-in jack was defective, so I eventually secured a real microphone to test with, and discovered that the camera was working just fine, and that all the noise was being generated by the Sima MZM-1. In short, I spent around $40 to buy a microphone that was far inferior to the camera's built-in microphone, and wasted hours trying to troubleshoot the problem. If you buy this microphone after reading all of the reviews, you have no one to blame but yourself for the misery this product will bring to you. As a final observation, the microphone's rubber mounting system does not seem to actually dampen any noise, and in fact appears to increase the noise from movement since it allows the microphone to flap around a bit (not that you'd hear it over all of the other noise this microphone introduces).
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Posted: Feb 24 2008
Totally worthless. The built in mike on my JVC camcorder is a million time better than this piece of trash. There was no noticeable difference between the normal and zoom settings. DO NOT BUY THIS! PLEASE! Don't give Sima any money for creating horrible products.
