Jeffrey Scorsone wrote:
> > This is the only misfeature on the R90, and a small price to pay for more
> > than 10 hours of playback battery life on the tiny NiMH cell.
>
> Serious mis-feature.
Trading off response time to your merest whim in return for battery
life AND small size is a mis-feature? I think not.
> New hardware should be better than the previous
> generations. It's smaller, lighter, and SLOWER! (also more prone to skips
> from the reports on this list, and on usenet)
Nothing like spreading rumor. As an owner of an R90, I can comment
from actual experience.
The R90 has some shortcomings but IMHO, no one has targeted them yet
in this thread. Sure it is a bit slow responding from stop but I'm
more than willing to live with that in return for battery life. My
battery lasts much longer than 11 hours, long enough that I don't
even give battery life much thought anymore. I bought a spare
battery with the rig but have never used it.
As far as skipping, mine never has. I don't do anything athletic
but I do wear the thing while working. That includes climbing
ladders, crawling in places and such. Nary a skip. And, Oh My
GAWD, what if it did skip once or twice? Damn, guess I'll have to
pound it to pulp with a hammer and send the remains back to Sony,
huh?
Here are the shortcomings as I see it:
Inability to trade off response vs battery life. I'd like to be
able to set the powerdown delays so that if I wanted to, I could
have instant response in return for shorter battery life. I'd
gladly do that when editing.
It doesn't change its behavior much when on shore power. There is
no reason for all the power saving techniques when running on a wall
wart. The delays are lengthened a little but not enough. I'm sure
there are some thermal management issues that apply in this tiny
case but I wish they'd done it a bit better.
The slew rate is much too slow. It needs a fast-fast forward to move
rapidly through long segments. I use mine a lot for time shifting
radio shows. It's a real pisser to be an hour into a show, bump the
<< button and get taken back to zero. If I think of it, I try to
mark a track every 30 mins or so. Which brings me to:
No periodic track mark.
Here's a real biggie for me: Settings are non-volatile. I hate
having to manually change to mono, change to manual record level,
etc, every time I change discs. Since the megabase setting and the
phrase library survives powerdown and even battery changes, there is
obviously some non-volatile RAM in there somewhere. So let's use
it!
The track detection is absolutely brain dead. It is so sensitive to
even a single data bit that getting it to lay down only a single
mark between tracks is impossible. Best I've been able to do is to
get it to leave 2 marks and then just go back and eliminate the
un-needed ones. This was a big FU on Sony's part.
I don't like the jog lever much and it's on the wrong side for
right-handed people. Surely, given Sony's vast resources, they
could come up with a better way of titling.
> > If that degree of precision is a requirement, why aren't you using a studio
> > deck for editing?
>
> Why should the newer (and assumed therefore better) equipment, not measure
> up to it's predecessor? The R50 was quite accurate, why should the R90
> be less so?
No one has yet established that the track mark on the R90 is
inadequate. I certainly can't say that. Short of having a shuttle
lever, the button does it about as good as one could expect.
Despite the shortcomings, I'm quite happy with the unit. Yes, I'd
buy another.
John
--
John De Armond
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://personal.bellsouth.net/~johngd/
Neon John's Custom Neon
Cleveland, TN
"Bendin' Glass 'n Passin' Gas"
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