I had planned to create my own little guide for “Intro to Portable Recording”, but I received my B&H email newsletter last week, and they already had a fantastic guide that covered portable field recorders. Now, these are not what I would use primarily (or much at all) as a field production sound man, but the information that B&H has is in-depth, easy to ready, and covers many concepts that even a higher level field recordist should know.
Portable Digital recorders are something that I would use as a backup recorder (for the event that my main one breaks on set) or I would use them for quickly capturing simple ‘wild sounds’. Having one in your arsenal is highly recommended and being familiar with them, at the very least, should be a requirement for any location sound person.
B&H’s guide covers connections, mic interoperability, media, usages, etc… You should definitely take a look at their guide; I love how much they cover and how much you can really take away from their information. See it here:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/audio/buying-guide/recommended-portable-digital-recorders
I’ll have to follow up with my own guide to ‘big boy’ recorders later :)