A number of you have sent me emails about incredibly slow boot times when using the Zoom h4n. Instead of replying to the question multiple times, I thought it might be easier to address it here.

The Zoom h4n is a pretty decent field recorder for the price, but it doesn’t seem to play well with large capacity memory cards. I haven’t had this problem on the Tascam DR-60d or any of my other field recorders for that matter. The problem seems to be limited to the Zoom h4n.

Tascam DR-05 and Zoom H4n

The slow boot time isn’t a huge issue, as long as you stick to cards in the 4GB to 8GB range boot times stay under 1 min which isn’t horrible. That’s also enough space to get you through an average day of recording. Not sure what causes the Zoom h4n to have this problem, but as long as you are aware of it, you can avoid the 3 or 4 min wait times larger cards can cost you. In this case it looks like larger cards aren’t the answer.

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