Customer Reviews

Sima MZM-1 Mini Zoom Camcorder Microphone

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I bought this to shoot a wedding, I was hoping to get better audio of the ceremony than the mic built in my camera (canon zr40).

Fortunately we did some trial runs - turns out the audio quality was FAR BETTER without this microphone! It turned everything into a tinny and unsatisfactory tone.

Switch has two positions - zoom and normal - couldn't tell a difference between them. Tried the microphone in many different locations and it just sucked overall...

Due to the lack of info on the web about this mic I thought i should comment...
I recently decided to get a DV-CAM to make promos for my bass guitar company. I spent a great deal of time finding a consumer camcorder w/ a mic in and settled on a pv-gs300. The built in mic on the gs300 is ok but recording electric bass with a mic is quite difficult. After several comparision tests between the built-in mic and the sima it became blatantly apparent that the sima was garbage. Huge amounts of hiss and noise and very uneven frequency response! The built-in mic sounded beautiful in comparison. For the price I figured this mic was marginal but thought it would at least be useable...it is not. If your looking for the worst possible sound for your videos I'd highly recommend it!
So, the search continued... I settled on a Rode Videomic which is fantastic!RODE VideoMic Directional Camcorder Microphone They also make a stereo video mic if you need stereoStereo VideoMic. The Rode video mic has extremely low noise,flat frequency response and another really nice feature is a built in attenuation switch (0, -10, -20) for DV-Cams w/o a mic gain control.

Anyway.. point is don't waste your time with the sima mzm1 mic! There is a very good reason it is the cheapest camcorder specific mic on the market!

Cheers

I bought this to improve the sound on Canon Elura 100; even though the camcorder has pretty poor sound qaulity, but it was still FAR better without this MZM-1 microphone. The MZM-1 sound quality has heavy static, and we could not tell the difference between "normal" and "zoom".

SIMA should be sued for misleading advertising, the box reads: "Eliminates Background Noise" and "Sturdy" but such claims are absolute rubbish! It does not eliminate background noise, it actually introduces interference into your soundtrack and if you by any chance switch it to "zoom mode" you are going to hear nothing but noise. The mike picks up sound from the front as well as the back, it is not directional by any stretch of the imagination, all claims by the manufacturer are absolute lies.
It is not sturdy either, it is made out of cheap plastic and so is the hot-shoe that attaches to the camera. In fact, it is so fragile, I almost broke it taking it out of the package. If you had a bad experience with this mike, return it and write a review here, perhaps eventually they will stop making this piece of junk. Avoid it at all cost.

I purchased the mzm 1 for a major interview, but it's worse than the camera itself. It claims that the rubber stops the motor sound. What's a flimsy piece of rubber band going to do? I have to look into other microphones like the canon dm-50. Please don't buy it. I know it looks tempting because of its price, but just trust us on this. I did several tests by changing variables such as batteries, wind socks, and zoom/normal, but it just doesn't work! If I could, I would rate it a zero instead of a one. I don't even understand why it got patented. It's nothing!

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).

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.

I am so annoyed by what junk this product is, that I decided to take a moment out of my day to let the world know. DO NOT BUY THIS. I compared the audio quality on the built-in camcorder mic to the Sima and the built-in is far and away better. Hope I saved somebody the trouble of buying this trash.

It's unethical to sell such a mediocre product and make such false promises. The sound quality is simply awful, significantly worse than the camera's original microphone. And switching from "normal" to "zoom" has no real effect: it is bad, and it remains bad.

I flew from California to Switzerland to conduct 10 video interviews of very interesting (and busy!) people. The first eight, taped with the Sima MZM1 microphone, are basically useless. The last two are decent, only because I realized that this device was ruining my project and I stopped using it.

What a shame to market such an awful product!

You camera will record audio better WITHOUT this microphone. Luckily I bought it locally and will be returning it.