Enter the Røde Podcaster: This USB microphone promises to make recording professional-sounding audio with your Mac really simple. But does it live up to the promise?

What’s in the box

The Podcaster comes in a sturdy black box: Apart from the mic itself, you’ll also find a USB A to USB B connector (the kind most printers require but never include), and an adapter ring for connecting the mic to a stand.

Build Quality

The microphone has a solid metal enclosure that gives it considerable heft and weight, but in a really good way. It has a fairly large pickup area that is also protected by the outer casing, which is good as the mic grill is something that is often damaged by knocks or drops on traditional microphone designs.

The adapter screw also doubles as the USB port enclosure and is also entirely made out of metal. This should also do wonders for this mic’s durability, as the stand adapter is often under a lot of strain on mics and can often crack if made out of plastic.

The one minor gripe I have is the headphone volume control on the front of the mic: It’s made out of plastic and feels a bit wobbly and out of place on a mic this well made.

Audio performance

Probably the most important factor when choosing a mic: How good does it actually sound? Røde promise “High quality broadcast sound” and I’m pleased to tell you that the Podcaster delivers. It has an incredible textured sound that gives recordings a “studio” feel. It sounds very accurate without too much treble and produces clean, warm audio.

A normal recording setup requires:
- A mic
- A mixer with preamps and monitoring capabilities
- An audio interface

Whilst there are some solutions out there that can act as an interface as well as a mixer, this mic is so much quicker to get set up: A single cable to your Mac, plug in your headphones and you’re set. Ever tried to record decent audio without hearing yourself? Or without hearing your overall mix? Getting monitoring set up (without a delay!) is usually more trouble than it’s worth – the Podcaster solves that issue nicely and you have zero timing issues.

I’ve created a short audio snippet to give you an idea of the audio quality: Both the voice and guitar heard in this video were recorded with the Podcaster.

Compatibility

The Podcaster works out of the box with OS X: Just connect the USB cable and you’re all set. There are some Windows drivers and applications on the CD that’s included, but you can safely ignore those. Fire up Garageband, select one of the vocal presets and you’re good to go. It also shows up as an audio output device immediately as well.

Tip: Remember to turn off Garageband’s live monitoring feature if you use the Røde as your output device (the mic will already pipe your audio to your headphones) – otherwise you’ll start hearing yourself twice!

Conclusion

The Røde Podcaster is a great microphone for any Mac user. It is well suited to creating podcasts, screencasts, movie voiceovers and even recording music. The build-quality is almost flawless and it offers an ideal feature combination of features for fast and easy recordings.
I’ve found myself quickly recording song ideas and voiceovers, simply because it’s so much less hassle to do so (previously I had been using an interface with a traditional microphone, which usually required extensive setting up and configuration to get decent results).

The Podcaster includes a 10 year guarantee and is available online for around $229 – less than a traditional microphone, audio interface with mixing capabilities would cost you. The convenience and audio quality you get for that price is currently unmatched in my opinion.
Highly recommended.

Links:

Røde Podcaster manufacturer website

Support Jetplane Journal: Buy the Rode Podcaster at Amazon.com

I recently discovered Samsung’s affordable color laser printer, the CLP-300 and as my Epson had started to chew up anything I’d try to print, I snapped it up. Here’s some of my experiences with it now after using it for a few weeks:

Size, looks and other physical characteristics

This is easily the smallest color laser I’ve ever come across before and it fits quite comfortably on the shelf of my Ikea desk-legs. It looks – well, a bit boring like most printers, but at least the paper tray doesn’t protrude very much. 

The printer is very quiet: You can hear it when it’s printing, but it’s not nearly loud enough to be annoying. The rest of the time it’s silent (as expected).

Getting started

Setting it up was a breeze and apart from a bit of toner dust that was floating about in the packaging of the magenta toner fairly hassle-free.

The printer comes with OS X drivers that use the typical ViseX installer (seriously – why does it always need to launch several separate installer applications?). As well as adding drivers, the installer also adds Samsung’s Smart Panel utility that lets you access options such as supply levels, print quality, and manual color adjustment.

One caveat: Smart Utility automatically adds itself to your menu bar and automatically starts when you login. But I don’t print that often and access my printer settings fairly rarely, so I’d prefer to launch it on a as required. However the utility is not in my Startup items and so far I haven’t actually found how I can prevent it from automatically launching.

Print Speed & Quality

A fair number of reviews on the internet point out that this is a 4-pass printer and therefore its color prints are a bit slower than other color lasers. But it’s more than fast enough for my requirements and I suspect the complaints mainly come from people using this printer in small businesses or home offices.

It’s also been pointed out that the color image quality isn’t as good as with comparable inkjet printers in the same price range. That is definitely the case, but having said that, photos printed with this printer looked fine and were more than good enough for things such as birthday cards, presentation graphics etc.

One adjustment I did make was to manually reduce  the color levels for all colors to “-6″. Lots of other reviews mentioned that the colors were quite over-saturated at the default settings and I noticed the same issue. But with the manual adjustment the colours look fine.

Here’s a sample print. As you can (hopefully) see, the text is very clear and crisp, whilst the color images are a little bit washed out. But the quality is generally not bad at all.

Cost

I paid €180,- for this printer and will hopefully soon receive €50,- back through Samsung’s cashback offer. The printer comes with “starter” toner cartridges that will last about half as long as the regular consumables (roughly 1000 black prints and 500 for each of the 3 color cartridges). A complete set of new cartridges will cost around €80,-. But for my casual needs, the included cartridges will hopefully last us quite some time and I don’t have to worry about them drying out, which frequently happened with my previous Inkjet printer. 

Conclusion

This is a great printer for home users who are looking for something with a bit more affordable consumables than most inkjets offer who don’t need to print huge amounts or photos.

View this printer at Amazon.